Re: [css-fonts] Font family selection

Can you elaborate on what you mean by web-compatible and breaking the web?

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 9:11 AM, Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield@apple.com>
wrote:

> While this goal is noble, it is not web-compatible. Changing browsers to
> do this type of thing would break the web.
>
> As a side-note, some browsers on some OSes may want to limit the set of
> fonts visible to the browser to only the set of preinstalled fonts on the
> OS in an effort to combat fingerprinting. It sounds like the use case you
> are describing requires user-installed fonts, so this approach may solve
> this problem.
>
> —Myles
>
> > On Aug 30, 2016, at 5:53 AM, Ilya Kulshin <kulshin@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Chromium, we've seen some instances where users end up with a font
> family that does not contain all of the expected styles. For example,
> someone might only have the bold style of Helvetica installed. When such a
> user views text with a style "font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
> font-weight: normal;", they would see bold text because that's the only
> style Helvetica can display, even though the page author clearly intended
> for regular text.
> >
> > Currently, the font matching algorithm requires using the first font
> family in the list that exists. The way the style matching is written, as
> long as there is any style, that family will match. I would like to propose
> that the algorithm should take the intended style (weight/stretch/etc) into
> account when matching families, and allow for matching a family specified
> later in the font-family rule if that family can provide a better style
> match.
> >
> > One possible implementation would be to assign a 'match-quality' to each
> family. For each family, the match-quality is evaluated and the family with
> the best match quality is used. One possible way is to evaluate
> match-quality is to assign it one of three values: good, average, or poor.
> A good match matches the desired style exactly or within a small tolerance
> (say, using a weight 300 font instead of desired weight 400). An average
> match matches the desired style on most characteristics but would be
> noticeably different. A poor match would differ noticeably on multiple
> criteria or have a very large difference on a single criteria (bold vs
> extra-light, for example). A more fine-grained scale could also be
> designed, if desired.
> >
> > One thing I'm not quite sure on is italic vs oblique matching. I suspect
> most users would not notice a significant difference between the two, but
> it would be good to get an opinion from someone familiar with typography.
> >
> > Any comments or concerns?
> >
>
>