Re: [css-fonts-4] compat problem with 'system' generic font family?

On 11/5/15, 3:54 PM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com> wrote:
>> Given Medium’s experiment [1] with a font stack that looks like:
>>
>> font-family: system, -apple-system, …
>>
>> Where ‘system’ matched a bitmap font apparently still included in Windows installations, do we need to pick a different unprefixed name for this new generic font family?
>
>Or people could just wait to use it until enough browsers implement
>the new value.  It's not actually a compat problem (unless we think
>there is a decent amount of pages actually trying to invoke the
>Windows "system" font), just an old-browser issue.

Authors will (and should) support older browsers for quite a long time. Even after all of the current browsers support the ‘system’ value it won’t be safe to use on Windows for years. So they’ll add ‘-apple-system’ without the unprefixed generic to their font stacks (as Medium has done now) which may force everyone to implement the prefixed version (I believe Firefox is already considering this).

Unless we want to standardize on ‘-apple-system’ I think we should pick a different generic name that doesn’t have a widely-installed conflict.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Sunday, 8 November 2015 07:06:08 UTC