Re: Proposal: add a "small-caps" value to "font-synthesis"

Are there any other opinions on this issue?

Thanks,
Myles
> On Jul 30, 2015, at 5:40 PM, Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield@apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 30, 2015, at 5:09 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Myles Maxfield wrote:
>> 
>>> The font-synthesis CSS property is a way for authors to opt-out of
>>> synthesized font traits such as bold or italics. It seems reasonable
>>> to add small-caps to this set. Using "font-synthesis: small-caps;"
>>> would specify that, if a small-caps font cannot be found, to use a
>>> non-small-caps font without synthesizing smaller, capital, text.
>> 
>> I think this would be possible to add but I wonder whether it's really
>> necessary. What's your thinking behind wanting to add it? Outside of
>> Firefox, fake small caps is what users always see when font-variant:
>> small-caps is used. Fake bolding and obliquing may or may not be shown
>> depending upon the font family.
> 
> WebKit supports this property as of r183494.
> 
> The fact that some UAs currently fake small-caps even when a proper
> font exists is just a bug, and one which I would like to correct in WebKit.
> 
>> 
>> Alan Stearns wrote:
>> 
>>> I like the idea of disallowing shrunken small caps, but font-synthesis
>>> appears to be specified in the reverse of your usage:
>>> “font-synthesis:weight;” allows smearing and “font-synthesis:none;” is
>>> the setting to disallow it. That makes it difficult to add new
>>> categories of synthesis blocking using that property.
>> 
>> While theoretically this might have some merit, I don't really think
>> this is an issue in practice. Changing the initial value doesn't change
>> what user agents do currently, since by default all of these synthesized
>> effects are allowed. Firefox is the only browser supporting this
>> currently so it's not really in wide use. Tweaking the property
>> definition isn't so hard. But I think question is do we really need this
>> or not.
> 
> WebKit supports this property as of r183494, so this value affects what
> WebKit does.
> 
>> 
>> In general I think it's best to avoid trying to support synthesized
>> fallback effects for font feature properties. Effects should be
>> explicitly opt-in rather than opt-out, which is what font-synthesis was
>> set up to allow. So I don't see a big need to add more values to
>> font-synthesis.
> 
> I disagree. Most users won't notice the difference between synthetic
> qualities and true qualities. Most users will, however, notice the
> difference between synthetic qualities and the absence of these
> qualities.
> 
> For the people (authors) who do notice the difference, font-synthesis
> is for them.
> 
>> 
>> ​