Intent to Implement And Ship: font-variant-numeric
Dominik Röttsches
Contact emails
Spec
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts/#font-variant-numeric-prop
Summary
Our implementation of CSS Fonts Module Level 3 has gaps. Now that font-variant-caps is implemented, I also have successfully turned font-variant from a primitive value property into a shorthand. As an alternative, font-feature-settings is working, but still some of the OpenType font feature selection through CSS value keywords are not implemented. We still miss some of the font-variant subproperties: At the moment we have ligatures & caps. This Intent to Implement and Ship requests to add font-variant-numeric.
Motivation
Using the CSS keywords for feature selection is at candidate recommendation status in the CSS Fonts Module level 3 and is the spec recommended way to activate common features:
"Authors should generally use ‘font-variant’ and its related subproperties whenever possible and only use this property for special cases where its use is the only way of accessing a particular infrequently used font feature."
Signals from content developers and font foundries indicate that the CSS font-variant-* value keywords are easier to work with and less cryptic than font-feature settings. In the case of font-variant-caps, there is also additional fallback/synthesis semantics for fonts that do not have this feature.
Interoperability and Compatibility Risk
Safari Nightlies and Developer Preview version and Firefox since 34 are shipping the feature.
Edge seems to ship only the low level font-feature-settings selection, but not the keyword implementations.
In my opinion the compatibility risk is low. The spec takes care of resolving some ambiguities between the font-variant: CSS 2.1 settings and and the newer syntax. (See the syntax for font-variant-css21 in the font property shorthand.)
Wherever possible, on Mac these font-variant-* keywords are mapped from OpenType features to the respective features of AAT fonts as good as possible. However, this is outside the scope of Blink and mainly done by our HarfBuzz text shaping library.
Ongoing technical constraints
None
Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes
Debuggability
Debuggable as usual through the CSS properties inspection panel, where values are autocompleted and can be toggled.
OWP launch tracking bug
Link to entry on the feature dashboard
https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5716551491649536
Requesting approval to ship?
Yes
TAMURA, Kent
Software Engineer, Google
Dimitri Glazkov
Chris Harrelson
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