Re: [css-fonts] "system" generic font name

System for Windows should equal “Segoe UI”. Not sure about Windows Phone.

—Michiel

> On 15 Jul 2015, at 00:32, Dean Jackson <dino@apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 15 Jul 2015, at 8:06 AM, Henrik Andersson <henke@henke37.cjb.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Myles C. Maxfield skrev:
>>> TL;DR: Apple proposes adding a new generic font-family named "system".
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> It's valuable for web authors to be able to make sites that fit in with native platforms without having to write lots of complicated, redundant CSS. One case where this is hard right now is matching platforms’ system UI fonts.
>>> 
>>> CSS describes a collection of “generic” font families. We propose adding a new generic font family, “system,” which will be backed by whichever font is the native UI font of the platform running the browser. Specifically, we are proposing that this new generic font family be platform-specific, and not browser-specific, so the same browser running on different operating systems will implement this generic font family differently.
>>> 
>>> WebKit currently implements a similar notion with the “-apple-system” font family, but we feel that a more general approach is valuable to web authors. In particular, web authors shouldn’t have to list anything specific to each platform they are targeting in their font fallback list. Instead, a single generic font family should just do the right thing. This is why we are proposing a prefixless value.
>>> 
>>> What are your thoughts?
>>> 
>>> Myles C. Maxfield
>>> 
>>> 
>> This would be horribly ambiguous. Many, many, many, systems have more
>> than one font.
> 
> Do they have more than one UI font family?
> 
> FWIW, we currently have "-apple-system". During internal discussions, I suggested keeping this name around in case someone wanted to only use the system font on Apple systems because they did not like the system font on other systems, where they would provide a fallback.
> 
> e.g. font-family: -apple-system, MyCustomFontThatILikeBetterThanEverythingElse;
> 
> But we figured this was a pretty small edge case, and that it would require other vendors to implement "-apple-system" for their browsers on Apple systems.
> 
> So "system" as a font-family seems like a pretty good compromise. It seems this will cover Android (Roboto) and Debian (DejaVu Sans). Does Windows use a different family for different types of controls? Other platforms?
> 
> Dean
> 
>