Seriously—that’s how you get small caps and swash? Seriously?? These look like optimization flags for a C compiler, not CSS.
I’m guessing that these are probably mapping through to the underlying OpenType features directly somehow to support arbitrary aspects of a particular type, but it still needs to be less of a mess for the “normal” stuff.
Why can’t it be something readable and self-documenting?
Actual implementations are currently CSS extensions as the functionality is not yet in a published spec.
Mozilla's CSS extension uses the syntax:
-moz-font-feature-settings: "kern=1";
Microsoft's CSS extension however uses the same syntax as the current W3C draft, expect with the standard browser specific prefix used before a feature makes it into the official spec.
-ms-font-feature-settings: "kern" 1;
Whether this syntax is ideal or not is still, imho, contestable. Either way it isn't Mozilla's parameter-esque style (which I agree stands very much in opposition to the usual CSS syntax style), and as long as the syntax in the draft reaches finalization, said parameter-esque syntax should go away for good.
Both are horrible. Mozilla's because the string is a transparent blob that's parsed separately to the rest of the CSS syntax and Microsoft's because it's dependent on ordering.
I don't see why a boolean value wasn't an option; the values is either defined or it's not. Otherwise "kern(1)" would have been more consistant with other properties.
I don't know what mozilla is doing but at least IE has improved since "filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader
(src='images/image.png',sizingMethod='scale');"
There's a trend towards lists in new CSS values (see transforms, transitions, etc.), but this seems to go against making site styles easily customizable using cascading/inheritance. It is a bigger pain to programmatically control. How about one value for one property:
font-caps: small; /* or none */
font-swash: contextual; /* or none */
This also gives room for future flexibility in values.
As thristian points out, font-feature-settings should be a last resort for rarely-used features without a separate syntax. It is not meant to set all features down.
You should read up on typography before decrying things about it. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style or Warren Chappell’s A Short History of the Printed Word are two great places to start.
The comments here are generally calling these “old-style” figures, but—while I’m aware that this is what some people call them—I think the term is a poor one. The old-style figures are better referred to as text figures and the so-called “usual” ones—which @funkah prefers—as lining or titling figures.
The difference between them is not really simply a stylistic choice: text figures are basically lowercase numbers and titling figures are uppercase ones. Saying you don’t like them is like saying you don’t like lowercase letters, and that you prefer everything in uppercase. Using titling figures in running text is like typing in all caps—it’s screaming at you.
It’s not so much that the text figures are old and were abandoned, but rather that typewriters simply left them off to simplify things. And since computer keyboards were based on typewriters, they never made their way to computers either. And then they started being used exclusively in newspapers and advertising. If you look at books, though, you’ll see that they never really went away. Only now are we finally getting them back—and that’s the entire point of OpenType and it’s a good thing.
Now, the difference between text and titling figures isn’t precisely the same as upper- and lowercase, since titling figures are generally used in titles despite the fact that titles can be mixed case; and they’re also used in tables of numbers. (Although there is another dimension of figure variation—namely, whether they are proportional- or fixed-width—and fixed-width lining figures are typically used in tables so that the places line up.)
We may be witnessing a kind of aesthetic path dependence. Text figures may be better, but if you have lived your whole life without seeing them then they will look out of place.
No, I don’t think that’s the reason why fashion brands are against knock-offs. They don’t necessarily expect that everyone who buys a counterfeit will buy the real thing. Instead, a market glutted with counterfeit products dilutes their brand and reflects poorly on the quality of their merchandise because consumers confuse the knock-off with the real thing. And that most certainly does lose them something.
A Chanel handbag is a luxury item that, in part, is desirable simply because of its expense and thus relative scarcity—not everyone can have one. Lifestyles brands are built in large part around a carefully crafted image of their consumer, and when every 19 year old Starbucks barista making $21K/year is walking around with a knock-off Chanel handbag it’s difficult to maintain the image they’re going for. Sales drop as the real consumers flee the brand, and then the company has no choice but to market to a lower demographic. Counterfeits undermine the company by commoditizing their goods.
Since fashion brands have significantly more limited legal protections for their products than other industries, I don’t see how you could expect them to be against an act that stands to enlarge the remedies available to them to protect their brands. It was shortsighted for the media companies to try to take a sledgehammer to the Internet—since what they sell are inherently digital products for which it was inevitable that distribution would move to the Internet eventually—but apparel is a physical product that isn’t in any danger of having that happen. For that reason apparel companies don’t care about the Internet (just like you probably don’t care very much about apparel), and I can’t say I could really blame them.
This isn’t even to mention the fact that fashion design is an art, and having opportunists steal your design, completely mangle it in an attempt to make it cheaper, and then sell it as an original is in all likelihood an incredibly infuriating thing simply from the perspective of artistic purity. Again, I find it hard to blame them for wanting to stop this, given that how well the Internet works is largely irrelevant to practically everyone in the entire industry.
There was an article (that I now cannot find) that claimed there was a positive effect of counterfeiting for high end fashion brands because it motivated buyers to more quickly move on to the latest version. Someone who is willing to spend $700 on a hand bag will get a newer version rather than hold onto the one they have when they see anyone and everyone sporting it.
That’s an interesting point, and I’d like to read that article, but I think it’d be highly situationally dependent on the particular brand and you’d have to know their internal sales numbers to confirm it.
Even if it were true, though, it still doesn’t address the fact that the designers would be crazy not to want more power to stop their designs from being stolen for simply artistic rather than pragmatic or business reasons. It’s not fair to call them greedy or immoral—and it’s certainly uncalled for and wrong to call them unpatriotic traitors—for wanting this and for not particularly caring about our industry just as we probably don’t really care about theirs. In fact, it’s that kind of one-sided ad hominem bullshit that’s actually the problem.
That being said, SOPA is still an unacceptable solution.
You made some very valid points in your replies and I was with you as long as you presented them as reasonable hypothetical motives for the fashion industry to support this bill.
However, when you say stuff such as In fact, it’s that kind of one-sided ad hominem bullshit that’s actually the problem, you presume that the point about them being greedy or immoral is invalid. That also sounds a bit naive and one-sided.
We've all observed how artistic rights, copyrights, patents are used by corporations to turn unscrupulous profits. Can you guarantee that executives leading corporations in the fashion industry are exempt of such practices? Would you vouch for their integrity if we decided to observe their various operations under the magnifier? Can you say with certainty that no questionable corners have been cut to turn up a buck or two?
You presume that the point about them being greedy or immoral is invalid
Yeah, I am presuming it—because I just laid out how what they’re doing is not necessarily driven by greed or immorality but defensible motives from their point of view. You’re simply saying they’re bad people and that’s probably not true in the vast majority of cases. I’m not vouching for anyone’s integrity, but you are so down a rabbit hole of fundamental attribution bias I don’t have any interest in attempting to change your mind.
No. Perhaps most of the wealth that you saw, working in finance, may have come from brute force (although I would disagree with that claim, prima facie, as well); but that doesn’t mean most wealth is accumulated that way.
You get money by using leverage to take other peoples money
No. That theory is called mercantilism, and we figured out that it’s wrong about three hundred years ago. You get money by bringing about the manifestation of value into the world. People who make money via leverage are doing that in a very specific way, but it’s far from the only way to do it.
The point still stand. Once you have created wealth, you need the ability to claim it and that is always a function of preexisting capital. The only difference when you "create" wealth being that you are in better position to negotiate with your various contenders than otherwise.
You need a citation that some guy once said that the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed? What would the world look like if it weren't true? There's no reasonable or useful definition of wealth for which the world of today has exactly as much wealth as the world of 10,000 years ago. (Or 1,000, or 100. 10, well, that can be successfully argued either way. It's not been a great 10 year run.)
I believe he's looking for a reference that Locke was a proponent of the idea, not that the idea is true. Similar to how you might ask for a reference if somebody suggested Shakespeare as the originator of the Theory of Relativity — it's not that you disagree with relativity itself, just the history given.
It's not a quote but the implication of Locke's entire discussion of property in his second treatise. He explains that value (wealth) is created by the labor expended to create products. It follows then that wealth is not fixed.
>He explains that value (wealth) is created by the labor expended to create products. //
This is not at all the same as:
>"You get money by bringing about the manifestation of value into the world." //
IMO value is created by labour enacted to process [raw] materials. You can get money however without creating value. Indeed a lot of trading appears to be a way to extract money without adding value. Optimisations to avoid wasted production are not creating value IMO. They can be beneficial, I feel, but I also find that we've gone way past the point at which financial markets are genuinely optimising the creation of value. The main mode of getting money appears to be exploitation of those expending labour to process materials.
Some poor unfortunate sell their kids to coffee plantations in Western Africa and a wealthy trader sits at a computer and extracts the value of the kids processing.
I think this is a long-term vote of confidence in the NYC tech ecosystem, but I also think they’re counting in the short term on the at least partial unraveling of the startup craze freeing up lots and lots of talent that is currently tied up in lackluster startups here.
Mostly, Facebook just copies Google's playbook, usually because so many of their managers came from Google. And a part of Google's playbook is that not every good developer wants to live and work in Silicon Valley, so you simply can't hire enough good developers if you only have one location. By the time a company has hired as many people as Facebook, they've failed to hire hundred of others who, for one reason or another, don't want to leave New York. Maybe their wife is in medical school or their husband is a quant on Wall Street. Maybe they like the arts, or nightlife, or walkability. Whatever it is, Silicon Valley is not for everyone and at the rate that Facebook (and ebay, and Google, and Twitter, and Microsoft) need to hire programmers, they have to consider a few out-of-town campuses.
The problem here is the judge, not necessarily Chanel. There’s a number of interesting quirks about the fashion industry that may make you more sympathetic of their tactics.
First, fashion designs are not only un-patentable, but they can’t even be copyrighted. Think about that for a second: if you design a piece of clothing, it’s not your design—anybody can simply start creating and selling exact copies and there is nothing you can do legally to stop them. If you write a book, record a piece of music, make a movie, take a photograph, paint a painting, or write a piece of software, your creative expression is protected by copyright and nobody can copy the form of what you’ve done. This is not true for fashion designs.
People routinely criticize luxury goods for being emblazoned with logos, and I often hear geeks put down consumers of luxury goods for being stupid enough to buy things with someone’s logo all over it. But given the complete lack of legal protection afforded to the designers, the logos in part came about so that the products could be protected under trademark law instead: they’ve got logos all over them because there’s no other good, reliable way to protect their work from being knocked off!
Incidentally, another thing I often hear professed snickeringly as proof of the triviality of fashion is the fact that trends change so quickly—new designs are pushed out many times a year and maintaining a highly fashionable wardrobe is like trying to stand on quicksand. This, again, isn’t necessarily for any insidious reason or because consumers are stupid—it’s simply because the good designs are knocked off almost immediately and unless new ones are pushed out constantly it’s difficult to, in the consumer’s mind, differentiate oneself from and stay ahead of the copiers.
But even if the above weren’t true, most luxury goods are qualitatively better products anyways. They’re better made and better designed. I knew someone once who had a Louis Vuitton wallet that their mother had handed down to them, originally purchased in the 60s, that was still in 100% perfect condition after constant use fifty years later. Take a look at your wallet and think about whether you expect it to be in one piece fifty years from now.
A Chanel suit is made with a hell of a lot more than $20 worth of materials and time, but even if it weren’t it’s irrelevant. Everyone here A/B testing their SaaS apps at wildly different price points should know it’s meaningless what the marginal cost of the goods are—what matters is how much you can sell them for to maximize profit.
Second, designing clothes in actuality takes a lot of money and time. Fabric is, relatively speaking, an incredibly expensive raw material in and of itself, but on top of that is the fact that it’s bulky, produced overseas, and needs to be shipped around the world multiple times—from the mills to the factories to the retail floors. It costs a mind boggling amount of money simply to ship samples of fabric from the mills to the design studios alone. Then add in the fact that every piece of clothing you wear is not sewn together by robots, but by human laborers.
Given the inherent difficulties, I really can’t blame luxury goods makers for the very brilliant and successful legal and sales tactics they employ in order to make a business out of it. It’s really no different from what 37signals has done, except that doing it with a physical product is a lot harder. You write software: there is no physical overhead and everything you create belongs to you. Fashion is very different. Given the lack of legal protections for their products the fashion industry makes for an interesting petri dish for what repercussions we might see if software or other patents were abolished.
You’re joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers are at their essence are experts in law—the word ‘lawyer’ even has the word ‘law’ in it.
It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing.
Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawyers who aren’t dealing in law? Housewives? Veterinarians?
It’s the same thing with lobbyists—they end up getting hired by government because they are experts in what they are talking about. You’re going to be very hard-pressed to find an expert that doesn’t have some vested interest somewhere in what they’re talking about.
Consider the conflict of interest that exists…
A common tactic I see when people argue about politics is that because someone could be doing something corrupt then it means that they then therefore are doing it. I could certainly go walk outside and push someone in front of a bus right now, but assuming I’m a murderer just because I could is not a good assumption. Conflicts of interest certainly raise the possibility of wrongdoing and should be scrutinized, but the simple existence of a conflict of interest is not proof of wrongdoing; for that you need not aspersions but, well, proof.
I am staunchly against SOPA being enacted without industry input, and I think it’s misguided to try to prop up dying content businesses that aren’t innovating, but spouting conspiracy theories about the politicians passing it for their own benefit isn’t going to help.
Actually this is an established theory. Here's Dr Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution chatting to Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University about the conflict of interest when lawyers make our laws. They also cover the bar system maintaining artificial scarcity among lawyers, thereby inflating legal fees.
You could just as easily ask why the bar has been certifying to many law schools when there are so many unemployed lawyers and less than half of JD graduates are able to get jobs practicing law. I'm kind of supportive of Winston's proposals for deregulating the legal services market, but there is definitely not an artificial scarcity.
Of course, you might be wondering why decent legal services still cost upwards of $300/hour, and my answer to that would be that a lawyer who charges $50 an hour has a hard time getting taken seriously. I've seen people come into internet forums asking the most asinine questions before going on to explain that they didn't trust the answers they received from their public defender, because he works for free and therefore he must not be any good.
I don't think he is joking. "The word of the law" can be kept separate from the intent of the law. I would prefer to see them as copywriters rather than as policy makers.
Your "pushing someone in front of a bus just because you can" metaphore is flawed: there's no gain in committing murder in public; conversely the whole point of corruption is financial gain.
I'm anti-conspiracy-theory too, but it's hard to argue that levying an enormous unfunded mandate on the most productive, most creative, most vigorously first-amendment-oriented corporate members of our society, which would force them to monitor the speech of each and every anonymous member they serve, is something that a Congress stupid enough to make the statements heard tonight would have concocted of their own accord.
edit: I think the above might be the longest grammatically correct run-on sentence I've ever written.
More than one independent clause, specifically. I believe your sentence still only has one of those, no matter how embellished the various parts of that independent clause may be :)
But this syntax they’ve come up with is an absolute horrifying mess. Ugh. Please say it ain’t so!
Seriously—that’s how you get small caps and swash? Seriously?? These look like optimization flags for a C compiler, not CSS.I’m guessing that these are probably mapping through to the underlying OpenType features directly somehow to support arbitrary aspects of a particular type, but it still needs to be less of a mess for the “normal” stuff.
Why can’t it be something readable and self-documenting?