On Jul 15, 2010, at 3:23 PM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Philippe Wittenbergh wrote:
>
>> A modern OS / browser will do the job for you.
>
> But most users, or (to be cautious) at least a non-negligible share like 40%
> of users, seem to be using an OS / browser that in non-modern by your
> implicit definition.
Yeah, and the user who uses Lynx on Windows 95, I know I know…
I never claimed that the CSS fall back mechanism provides perfect coverage for
all users.
I described the mechanism at work (as did fantasai and D. Baron).
>
>> p { font-family: font-a, font-b, font-c, serif;}
>>
>> Gecko, WebKit, Opera, and IE 8+ will look for the glyphs in font-a,
>> if that doesn't have the coverage [*], the browser looks at font-b,
>
> I'm not sure whether that happens even on those browsers in all situations.
> Even if it does, the situation is far from perfect.
> [...]
>
>> I specify 'Helvetica
>> Neue' as the font of choice on OS X; but that font doesn't have
>> coverage for some romanized characters (e.g ō), I thus specify a
>> fallback: 'helvetica', that has close-to-the-same metrics & look.
>
> That might be a good example in some sense, but it is a fairly limited case.
> It may help on OS X platforms, but what would happen in a more typical
> situation? The fallback of 'helvetica' is simply ignored.
Excuse me sir, but I _ explicitly gave an example for OS X only _. I didn't
mention anything what I am doing for other OS.
> Even if you carefully select a fallback font that is compatible with the
> primary font (and usually you can't do that very carefully, as the options
> are so limited in practice), a mix of fonts tends to produce bad results at
> least when a word contains letters from different fonts. For separate
> symbols, a mix is not that bad, if the fonts are roughly similar.
Usually you don't even know if the user has the font activated or not... :-).
Ah, the limits of web design.
> The morale is that fallback fonts are nothing you could count on. They may
> help at times, but basically you should select the primary font so that it
> is suitable for your needs and widely enough available. Depending on the
> content and purpose, different compromises need to be made. For example, if
> your material contains a large repertoire of special characters, you
> probably need to accept the consequence that many users won't see the page
> properly (though most can), due to use of a font like Arial Unicode MS.
@font-face {
font-family: 'my-font';
src: url(myfont.eot);
src: url(myfont.woff), url(myfont.ttf);
}
(abbreviated for simplicity).
Philippe
---
Philippe Wittenbergh
http://l-c-n.com/
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