4 ms·

Maybe I’m dense and I couldn’t draw this conclusion — were those properties always available but we’re never documented? If that’s true it seems crazy to me tha

Maybe I’m dense and I couldn’t draw this conclusion — were those properties always available but we’re never documented? If that’s true it seems crazy to me that Microsoft couldn’t just say, “Hey I know everyone is mad about font-face not being respected. Here’s this property you can set and all is well.”

jdsully 7y ago
If you had passed a supported font to the font-family tag it would have rendered it (it will not download a webfont). Since people really don't like seeing square boxes instead of characters windows tries very hard to find a font that will draw the character. Based on historic precedent Times New Roman is normally chosen. You'll note the fallback-families he lists are exactly those supported by the GDI LOGFONT structure which dates to windows 3.0. This is old creaky stuff we're dealing with. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns-wingdi-taglogfonta https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns...
bmn__ 7y ago
I concur it's crazy. Same thing happened with Internet Explorer. Back then, you could not have 5, 5.5, 6 together on one Win98. When installing later versions, they would replace earlier versions. But as a hobbyist I needed all to test my Web sites. The recommended work-around was VMWare. VMWare was not installable on Win98, so I tried Linux as host OS. That was the pivotal point that got me into my serious programming career. Years later a hidden API was found out that made it possible to install the browsers in parallel. http://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://labs.insert-title.com/Multiple-IEs-in-Windows_article795.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://labs.insert-title.com... If Microsoft had documented that for the public, they would have saved Web developers thousands of man-years of work.

jdsully 7y ago

If you had passed a supported font to the font-family tag it would have rendered it (it will not download a webfont). Since people really don't like seeing square boxes instead of characters windows tries very hard to find a font that will draw the character. Based on historic precedent Times New Roman is normally chosen. You'll note the fallback-families he lists are exactly those supported by the GDI LOGFONT structure which dates to windows 3.0. This is old creaky stuff we're dealing with. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns-wingdi-taglogfonta https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns...

bmn__ 7y ago

I concur it's crazy. Same thing happened with Internet Explorer. Back then, you could not have 5, 5.5, 6 together on one Win98. When installing later versions, they would replace earlier versions. But as a hobbyist I needed all to test my Web sites. The recommended work-around was VMWare. VMWare was not installable on Win98, so I tried Linux as host OS. That was the pivotal point that got me into my serious programming career. Years later a hidden API was found out that made it possible to install the browsers in parallel. http://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://labs.insert-title.com/Multiple-IEs-in-Windows_article795.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/2007/http://labs.insert-title.com... If Microsoft had documented that for the public, they would have saved Web developers thousands of man-years of work.