Contact [email protected]

Explainer / Specification
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#font-variant-alternates-prop
(This section contains details examples including images on how this
feature enables easier activation of font features.)

Summary

font-variant-alternates enables simpler access to glyph alternates in fonts
such as swashes, character-variants, ornaments and more. It provides an
easier method over having to use 4-letter-codes (e.g. 'swsh', 'cv01'...) as
arguments to font-feature-settings. font-variant-alternates refers to the
@font-feature-values at-rule to map speaking feature names to OpenType
feature numbers. In the font-variant-alternates style rule, the requested
feature activation becomes easy to use and to read and allows flexible
combination of font features.


*Motivation*

As *part of Interop 2022* we committed to supporting
font-variant-alternates and @font-feature-values in order to reach parity
with Firefox and Safari on this aspect of OpenType feature selection
through CSS.


The ergonomics of font-variant-alternates are better than having to know
OpenType feature codes and passing them to font-feature-settings.


Blink componentBlink>Fonts
<https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=component:Blink%3EFonts>

TAG reviewShipping in two browsers for a long time.

TAG review statusNot applicable

Risks


Interoperability and Compatibility

Low, extensively tested in WPT, shipped in Firefox and Safari.


*Gecko*: Shipped/Shipping (
https://caniuse.com/?search=font-variant-alternates) Shipped in Firefox
since 34.

*WebKit*: Shipped/Shipping (
https://caniuse.com/?search=font-variant-alternates) Shipped in Safari
since 9.1

*Web developers*: Web developers opinions were taken into account in the
interop 2022 process - so I'd tend to say the fact it's part of Interop
2022 indicates: "positive".

*Other signals*: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 - font-variant-alternates
amounts to 16% improvement in the Fonts and Typography Category of Interop
2022, about ~1% of the total score.

Ergonomics

This feature provides an ergonomics improvement over font-feature-settings.


Activation

Developers can immediately benefit from this feature when they write their
own @font-feature-values mappings to font features, based on the font's
documentation or tools such as https://wakamaifondue.com/. On top of that,
if the font foundry provides a @font-feature-values block, it becomes even
easier to activate font features.


WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that
it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?



Debuggability

The font-variant-alternates property is debugged through DevTools as usual.
This way parsing issues or invalid values can be detected. There's no extra
support for the @font-feature-values rule.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac,
Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests
<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/testing/web_platform_tests.md>
?Yes

Flag nameAtm available behind experimental web platform features (sson in
Canary, from 12/8/22)

Requires code in //chrome?False

Tracking bughttps://crbug.com/716567

Sample linkshttps://roettsch.es/montecarlo.html

Estimated milestones

110

Anticipated spec changes

None

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5070560260784128

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAN6muBsWXm4CYzT_%2BsTVW8X%3DKMJfkmVEv40_QHTjmDOV%3DSwAHA%40mail.gmail.com.

Reply via email to