Other Spec Review: <meta name="text-scale" content="scale" />

[davidsgrogan]

Specification

https://davidsgrogan.github.io/css-fonts-5/Overview.html#text-scale-meta

Explainer

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md

Links

• An introduction to the feature, aimed at unfamiliar audiences: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#introduction
• A description of the problems that end-users were facing before this proposal: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#user-facing-problem
• Alternatives considered: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#alternatives-considered , also most developer use cases would be solved by using env(preferred-text-scale) in CSS calc expressions, but we heard from web developers that they "just want rem to work like they were promised" -- i.e. rem will honor the users' a11y preferences, no matter if those prefs are specified at the OS-level or UA-level, they don't want to mess around with env().
• Examples of how to use the proposal to solve the end-users' problems: https://davidsgrogan.github.io/css-fonts-5/Overview.html#ex-scaled-page
• What do the end-users experience with this proposal: Font sizes will honor the users' OS-level a11y preference. See https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/env-preferred-text-scale.md#example-1-reddit part p[4]
• Web Platform Tests: None yet

The specification

• Follows the Web Platform Design Principles.
• Includes Security and Privacy Considerations sections based on answers to the Security/Privacy Questionnaire.

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

• GitHub repo: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts
• Primary contacts:
  • @davidsgrogan Google, CSSWG member, Spec author, Chrome implementer
  • @JoshTumath BBC, CSSWG member, Spec reviewer, Explainer author, Feature champion, Dx pollster
• Organization/project driving the specification: CSSWG, Google, BBC
• This work is being funded by: Google and BBC
• Primary standards group developing this feature: CSSWG
• Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design:
  • [css-env][css-fonts-5] New <meta text-scale> tag to make UA initial font size respond to OS text scale setting w3c/csswg-drafts#12380 (comment)

Feedback so far

• Multi-stakeholder feedback:
  • Mozilla comments: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/NNN
  • WebKit comments: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/NNN
  • {{...include feedback/review from developers, implementers, civil society, and others}} -- we've gotten informal positive feedback from web developers at a few conferences (thanks @JoshTumath for polling). Other implementers: Apple and Mozilla engineers had vaguely positive comments during the CSS telecon where this was resolved to add, FWIW (minutes). (I'll file standards-positions requests ASAP, though.)
• Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification: [css-fonts-5] Should absolute font size keywords scale at different rates depending on user's preferred text scale? w3c/csswg-drafts#12475 -- the unresolved issue is if we should specify that UAs should scale fonts non-linearly... meaning the larger the font already is, the less of an enlargement multiplier it would get. We anticipate that shipping linear scaling will NOT prevent from future experiments with non-linear scaling. We are not aware of any opposition to the specification.
• Status/issue trackers for implementations:
  https://chromestatus.com/feature/5112244702674944
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1976522

You should also know that...

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