Design Review #719

#719: FYI Review of CSS Fonts 4 `font-palette`and `@font-palette-values`

Opened Mar 14, 2022

Braw mornin' TAG!

Review Request

I'm requesting a TAG review of font-paletteand @font-palette-values and intent to inform the TAG about the existing plans to ship this feature in two engines, see below.

Explainer¹: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/pull/7138 & https://github.com/drott/csswg-drafts/blob/paletteExplainer/css-fonts-4/palette-explainer.md
Specification URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-4/#font-palette-prop
Tests: https://wpt.fyi/results/css/css-fonts?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=palette
User research:
Security and Privacy self-review²: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-4/#security
Primary contacts (and their relationship to the specification):
- @drott, @litherum, @svgeesus
Organization(s)/project(s) driving the specification: Google, Apple
Key pieces of existing multi-stakeholder review or discussion of this specification:
- Previous issues (non-exhaustive list) that @litherum, @drott and @svgeesus discussed while WebKit and Blink were implementing this.
External status/issue trackers for this specification (publicly visible, e.g. Chrome Status):

Further details:

✅ I have reviewed the TAG's Web Platform Design Principles
The group where the work on this specification is currently being done: CSS WG
The group where standardization of this work is intended to be done: CSS WG
Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification: None that I knew off.
This work is being funded by: Google, Apple

You should also know that...

Real word example

There's a polyfilled example of custom palette usage at https://underware.nl/fonts/plakato/features/color/ where font foundry Underware hosts their Plakato Color Grade experiment.

Shipping intentions

Safari publishes this feature in their Safari 15.4 Beta Release Notes, indicating a plan to ship this soon. For Blink @drott posted an intent-to ship as well. So two engines are planning to ship this feature in the near future.

Feedback Channel

We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as comments on this issue.

Discussions

2022-04-25

Minutes

Lea: override colors does/does not support var references... discussion in CSS WG ... no consensus. Some clunky syntax... but reasonable response. Happy with that reasoning... the issues with references will be solved in a diffferent spec...

Peter: microsoft did somehting with --color ... custom properties?

Lea: no they are not defining custom properties... author defined...

Dan: Implementation status? Looks good from chrome status... Shipping in 101.

Lea: shipped in 15.4 Safari

Dan: looks good from a multi-stakeholder pov.

Dan: Shall we give it a thumbs up?

Peter: in the explainer ... custom colors ... multiple fonts being used within an element... can you reuse that overridden colors identifier? font palette value... keyed to the font?

Peter I can raise this issue in CSS wg - don't think it's architectural.

Dan: then I suggest we close with satisfied.

so mote it be

Peter: will write comment

(dug more throught the spec and answered my question, no issue)