RE: FW: Font-family specification

Chris Wilson ([email protected])
Fri, 26 Jan 1996 11:33:14 -0800


Chris Lilley wrote:
>I would also like to see spaces allowed in font names. This could be
>done by choosing some character as a separator (such as the comma Chris
>suggests) <...> or alternatively by quoting

Several other people have suggested quoting; I agree quoting should be
allowed (that is, in the spec and supported), but I think a non-whitespace
separator should be used anyway, for the following reason.

Let's say I'm hand-authoring a document. I decide I want to use Times New
Roman for all H1 headers, so I write
<style>
h1 { font-family: Times New Roman }
</style>
This seems perfectly straightforward, but this would actually look first for
a font named "Times" (which it may or may not find), then a font named "New"
(which it probably won't find), and then it will find "Roman" (which may or
may not exist). I guess I'm saying that unless authors specify more than
one family name (e.g., the desired family and a generic family), I doubt it
will occur to them that they should have quotes around the names.

>> Some of the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows platform
(remember,
>> it is the most popular OS out there) have spaces in their names (e.g.,
>
>I do not believe this is a platform issue.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was; I just meant that some of the default
fonts that ship with at least one popular operating system (Windows) have
spaces in their names.

-Chris
Chris Wilson
[email protected]