Re: CSS21 @font-face removal

If a browser supports Unicode, then all that may be  needed to display the
script is the font.

There seems to be an assumption that displaying minority scripts must require a
concerted effort and a specialized system.
It doesn't need to be the case. Certainly some scripts are complex to display.
Others are in the minority not because they are technologically difficult but
because there are not many speakers.

What about the idea of keeping the simpler parts of @font-face, and only
deprecating the more complex or the pieces least likely to be adopted?
tex

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 09:02 Europe/Helsinki, Tex Texin wrote:
> 
> > With respect to minority scripts, no - the fact that you can read it
> > does not
> > mean automatically that your computer system comes with support for it.
> 
> If a person can read a minority script and has a system that could
> display the script, provided that the proper Unicode code points are
> used and a suitable font is installed, I think it is perfectly
> reasonable to expect the person to install such a font and choose a
> browser that can use the services provided by the system.
> 
> If the infrastructure isn't there, providing a dynamically downloadable
> font that is properly encoded from the Unicode point of view isn't
> going to help.
> 
> Then there's the practice of transferring Latin gibberish and applying
> a font that is a Latin font from the system's point of view but
> contains glyphs for another script. I think CSS 2.1 should not
> accommodate fontifying Latin gibberish to look like text in a minority
> script in browsers that happen to support such a trick. That approach
> may appear to work (for some value of "work") in some cases but causes
> problems with search engines and usually with browsers other than the
> one the author of the page was using.
> 
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@iki.fi
> http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

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Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
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Received on Monday, 20 October 2003 13:13:21 UTC