Hey everyone,
I’m new relatively new here, would really appreciate some feedback on a small CSS project.
Normalize.css is a popular CSS file that makes HTML elements appear more consistently across browsers, in line with modern standards. I’m working on an extension to that, which sets OpenType features defaults through CSS’
font-feature-settings
property.
I wrote about it here:
Introducing Normalize-OpenType.cssIt’s available on GitHub for free under the MIT License.
Thanks for looking!
Comments
That said, this whole topic goes more in the direction of design and is probably much more interesting to web designers than belonging in a forum of typeface designers, so we should perhaps better have this discussion elsewhere.
You may want to have a look at http://www.impallari.com/testing/
There is and Open Type panel that also show suggested CSS settings for each feature.
My goal was definitely to take some of the decisions out of the hands of the designer, making typographic conventions there by default. I think many designers writing CSS would be fine with use these features, but not necessarily know what to use where.
I appreciate you taking a look at it, it’s helped me for my next post about it for sure!
Pablo, thank very much. I appreciate the resource, too. Normalize-OpenType.css actually has its own test suite, you can check it out on GitHub if you want. It’s not particularly useful for other projects, but it is how I make sure things work for this project itself.
Note that for some fonts, contextual alternates are necessary just to get default good behavior. The fonts were built with the assumption that proper typesetting would happen.
So they really ought to be on by default.
http://www.tiro.com/John/Enabling_Typography_(OTL).pdf
You might find the table 'State' entries (page 6) useful in determining which features are expected to be on by default.
Ideally, of course, default typographic feature settings would be implemented at the browser level, but in the meantime your normalisation CSS is a good idea.
Also, my general model needs to be extended in both directions: back to a step 0 script itemisation stage, and forward to a linebreaking and post-justification layout stage. But you don't need to worry about those.
Opentype is only concerned with the portion of the typographic mantra of Script/Language/Character/Glyph and on to Word, where everything before that, like Glyph Feature and Size on up to Family/style are broken, and everything from Word on, is broken, then "all the way up to the design of whole documents, publication series, [Operating System User Interfaces], and dynamic text presentation systems", is pretty distant, where broken means implemented to cause the requirement for fonts or no particular import.
A whole generation of type designers have heard of and/or met one stubborn product manager after another, (who apparently run the show), and have now fairly totally pre-ruined the landscape for simple solutions. Though I love your document, the fact of OT's failure on simple adjacency and the failure of all adjacent typographic technologies is staggering, and actually no longer approachable.
( I Mean: some people are celebrating fonts that still work after 30 years. I am not celebrating fonts that still work after 30 years, I mourn the apps these fonts work in, and the users for whom this is possible.)
What's left, IMHO is to make sure the type designer has the ability to complete a source(s) satisfying the entire mantra if they need to, i.e. being an effective "first typographer", and waiting... I'm glad you have other ideas.