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

From a Chinese front-end/ebook designer’s view, that’s a great proposal, especially for desktop OS at the moment.

Apple recently added new Chinese UI font “PingFang” in OS 10.11 and iOS 9, there’s huge works to be done to fit the change. On mobile devices, it might be unnecessary for now because usually only one Chinese system font, so sans-serif is capable for select system UI font. But I believe its for now, mobile OS may have more fonts in the future, and as I know some Android manufacturers already added their own font as system UI font. 

But about the name, maybe “system-ui” is better than “system” to fit the definition?


Bobby Tung
W3C invited expert
Chinese Layout Task Force Co-chair



> Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield@apple.com> 於 2015年7月15日 上午5:14 寫道：
> 
> 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

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2015 02:06:54 UTC