[css-fonts] Selecting generic fallbacks #8128
Description
This issue is intended to be a home for a topic arising during the joint CSS+i18n WG monthly telecon.
The latest minutes say (https://www.w3.org/2022/11/22-i18n-minutes.html):
addison: Consider nastaliq, is it tied to language or is it a font style?
… affects legibilityflorian: Might not meet the bar. Meets the bar of it's important
… but it's not clear that you have documents that contain both nastaliq and something else, and if you lose the distinction you lose informationaddison: unclear you'd have document where they're validly mixed
… maybe if you have Arabic document talking about Urduflorian: it's very relevant, but not very relvant contrast
… that's kind of thing that doesn't meet fantasai's bar
… however, might also be nice to have, because it's a thing people want
… but if the browser is smart enough, which it should be, if you say it's Urdu it should make it nastaliq without you telling it to
… because that's how Urdu should be rendered
… for Persian, less clear, could have either
It's not really about mixing or contrasting font styles on a page. It's more fundamental.
Here's a use case for nastaliq. Let's imagine that an Urdu or Kashmiri content author has created a page and would like to apply some nifty opentype features that come with the font Awami Nastaliq. So they declare that font as the primary font for the whole page. Let's suppose that they also add Noto Nastaliq Urdu to the font stack, in case someone doesn't have Awami Nastaliq installed. Beyond that, though, it's hard to guess what other nastaliq fonts the reader may have on their system.
Along comes a reader who has neither of those fonts installed, but does have Nafees Nastaleeq or one of its derivations. Unfortunately, the font used for the page currently falls back to a naskh font, even though the reader has a nastaliq font available to them.
This is an issue. It actually has practical consequences. Nastaliq is not just a fancy stylish font - people in Pakistan or India will struggle to read text that is not in a nastaliq font. And in addition, it will not fit with their cultural identity. Just a couple of weeks ago i watched a conference presentation by an Urdu font expert who explained that when Urdu speakers come across some text in a naskh style font they tend to ignore it, because the expect that it's likely to be Arabic language text.
So there needs to be some way for the content author to say that if the browser falls back to a different font it should choose one that's in the nastaliq style. We're not talking about special bits of text like headings or fancy boxed sections, we're talking about the whole page.
This also applies in a slightly different use case, but one that may have value, where the content author decides that they don't really mind which font is used, so they don't provide a specific font name in the font-family property values. However, if they are writing for an Urdu or Kashmiri audience they don't want the text to come out in naskh style - which currently is the most likely outcome. So they'd like to be able to say: font-family: nastaliq. We see this in the West already, where people don't assign a specific font for their page, but might say font-family: sans-serif. Having a nastaliq generic name allows people speaking Urdu and Kashimiri to do the same.