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

Alan Stearns wrote:

> >Thinking about this a little more, I don't think we should add
> >'small-caps' to the 'font-synthesis' property. The CSS Fonts spec
> >defines *required* fallback behavior when 'font-variant' is set to
> >'small-caps' and the font lacks small caps glyphs. This is different
> >from the way font selection works for the synthetic bold and italic
> >cases, those are basically *optional* features added by the user
> >agent.
> >>
> While it’s true that the specification uses different RFC 2119 terms
> (should versus may), I’m not sure it should have. Bold and italic
> synthesis are technically optional but in practice ubiquitous, to the
> point that font-synthesis is required to be able to opt out.

I think synthetic bolding and italics tends to often be a source of
problems related to fonts missing from a font family, especially in the
case of webfonts. But that's rarely the case with small-caps support,
either the font supports it or it doesn't, that's not generally a source
of errors.

While I understand the logic behind what you and Myles are suggesting, I
don't think there's a strong use case to support this addition. I think
it's not a good idea to always introduce an escape for every font
feature related fallback that we define. That seems like a pattern that
will lead to lots of unneeded property values that no one uses.

Cheers,

John Daggett

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