Re: [css3-fonts] low-level font features

On Jun 22, 2010, at 10:36 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

>> 	font-feature-settings: LOLZ;
> 
> Emphatically YES.

I thought so. Excellent. Should the spec mention this directly? It says "where ‘<feature-name>’ is the case-sensitive name of an OpenType feature defined in [OPENTYPE-FEATURES]" and points to the feature registry page. That page makes no mention of the vendor space allowance. Maybe it could say something like:

... where ‘<feature-name>’ is the case-sensitive name of an OpenType feature defined in [OPENTYPE-FEATURES] or a [VENDOR SPACE TAG] as defined in the OpenType specification ...

[VENDOR SPACE TAG]: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featuretags.htm.

> If we don't allow this, experience suggests that people will instead "repurpose" existing features for semantically incorrect use-cases, just because "they work"

I agree. If anyone needs to see evidence of this, take a look at the state of OpenType feature support in desktop applications and how features have been structured to make things work for users. Not all applications support the same features, so we (designers and foundries) end up duplicating behavior across features. It's not pretty.

Tal