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

> On 16 Jul 2015, at 12:10 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:
> 
> Myles Maxfield wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> This sounds fine to me. I think the other system UI font values of the
> 'font' property are a bit of a failed experiment. Different user
> interfaces use different typographic systems so it's difficult to map
> those onto a common set of system font keywords that work consistently
> across devices/platforms. But I think having a generic font-family name
> that maps to the default UI font family would be easy to define in a
> consistent way.
> 
> Other generics are generally content-locale sensitive and I think a
> 'system' generic should be also.

Indeed. This was a motivation for the generic name over exposing "San Francisco", which isn't the system UI font on all locales.

Dean


> So content marked as lang="ja",
> font-family: system within an English UI would use the *Japanese* UI
> font rather than the English one. This is inline with how generics are
> generally implemented and different from how the system font values work.
> 
> Note that this is different from the "default content font" which user
> agents typically map for Latin-script locales to a serif font family.
> Non-Latin-script locales sometimes map to sans-serif, depending upon the
> common usage for a given locale. Most font API's have some way to query
> for the UI font. Under Linux for example, a GTK call would be used
> rather than a simple fontconfig query.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John Daggett
> Mozilla Japan
> 
> ​

Received on Saturday, 18 July 2015 00:46:08 UTC