Re: Default fonts with broken font-variants

I filed https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5756 with a little more
research. It probably makes sense to discuss further there.

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 5:34 PM Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin@google.com> wrote:

> Hi CSS folks,
>
> I was playing around with font-variant-numeric and discovered that the
> default serif and sans-serif fonts on Windows 10 show all numbers in
> numerator-mode when you ask for diagonal-fractions:
> https://crbug.com/1154042. Working around this as a page author would
> seem to require me to enable font-variants based on the state exposed by
> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-font-loading/.
>
> What's the "right" way to handle this? Have page authors change styles
> when their webfonts load? Have browsers special-case known-bad
> combinations? Add a declarative way to use different styles for different
> fonts?
>
> Has this group done an audit of any sort to figure out which font variants
> are usable in which contexts? The spec mentions that "it's not suitable for
> use as a paragraph-level style" in an example, but I can't find a normative
> statement about how these are actually supposed to be used.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeffrey
>