Re: FW: Font-family specification

Scott E. Preece (preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com)
Wed, 31 Jan 1996 13:07:32 -0600


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

| I would highly recommend doing both - changing separators from whitespace to
| commas, and recommending the use of quotes to wrap font family names. The
| reason for this is evident when you consider an example with more than one
| font-family:
|

---

Chris has interpreted the draft as allowing multiple font-family names in the specification of the font property. That took me a little by surprise, but I guess the spec actually does imply that is allowed. If this is correct, I agree with Chris that expecting to be able to distinguish a font-family from a font-weight from a font-style by value is unacceptable. Either the specification of the font-family property should specify comma-separation if multiple values are present *OR* the font property should have required separators between its components *OR* a multi-valued font-family must have surrounding bracketing.

In more detail, either define font-family as:

font-family-name: <family-name> | <generic-family> font-family: font-family-name [ ',' font-family-name ]* example becomes: font: 12pt/14pt "New Century Schoolbook","Serif" bold

*or* define font as:

font: font-size [/ line-height] - font-family - [font-weight] - [font-style] example becomes font: 12pt/14pt - "New Century Schoolbook" "Serif" - bold -

where the '-' characters are required even when the optional values are empty (I don't care what character is chosen for the separators - comma would be OK, too).

*or* use brackets and define font-family as:

font-family-name: <family-name> | <generic-family> font-family: font-family-name | '('font-family-name+')' example becomes: font: 12pt/14pt ("New Century Schoolbook" "Serif") bold

I would prefer the second alternative - making the structure of the font property explicit.

scott

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scott preece
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