Re: FW: Font-family specification

Scott E. Preece (preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com)
Fri, 26 Jan 1996 16:19:07 -0600


From: "Benjamin C. W. Sittler" <bsittler@mailhost.nmt.edu>
| On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, Chris Wilson (PSD) wrote:
|
| >... The draft says "..., and spaces in font family names
| > are replaced with dashes." This makes me as an implementor believe that
| > spaces are only allowed when they are translated to dashes, quoted or not
| > (i.e., even quoted spaces would be translated to dashes). The examples do
| > not quote, either, which makes me not think about using quotes to protect
| > spaces within individual family names.
|
| This is probably a bit of X-Windows-centric language that was left in the
| draft accidentally. Under X, for example, one would handle "Lucida Sans
| Bold" as a reference to the font "lucidasans-bold". Under MS Windows or
| MacOS, it would probably be interpreted as the modifier "bold" applied to
| the font "Lucida Sans" instead.
---

Actually, the X names *do* preserve whitespace in the names, as in: -adobe-new century schoolbook-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-181-iso8859-1 the dashes are used to separate fields in a formatted presentation of the font data. I thought the font name structure was a standard, but I may be wrong.

---
| I think the syntax for font family names should be consistent with the 
| rest of CSS (and HTML) grammar in delimiting font names with whitespace 
| and using quotes (either single or double, if we want to be consistent 
| with SGML and thus HTML) around all names which contain spaces or other 
| "special" characters. Single words with no special characters, on the 
| other hand, should not require quoting, also for consistency with {HT,SG}ML.
---

That's the basis for my preference.

From: "Chris Wilson (PSD)" <cwilso@microsoft.com>

| >b/t/w - I believe the current grammar would not support the suggestion - I | >think it requires quoting. | | To handle whitespace? The draft says "..., and spaces in font family names | are replaced with dashes." This makes me as an implementor believe that | spaces are only allowed when they are translated to dashes, quoted or not | (i.e., even quoted spaces would be translated to dashes). The examples do | not quote, either, which makes me not think about using quotes to protect | spaces within individual family names.

---

I was referring to the semi-machine-readable grammar at the end of the CSS spec, which requires STRINGs to be quoted. However, as I re-read it, it would accept the comma-delimited, unquoted form, but it would return the pieces of the name as separate IDENT tokens connected by space operators, that the UA would have to recombine into strings. Comma or space-separated quoted strings would be returned as STRING tokens combined by space or comma operators. So, I guess you could say the grammar would handle either, but the UA would have to be aware of the alternatvie forms.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
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