Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 03/12/06 23:45

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006, dorayme wrote:

> In article <Xns9783DA4546A9Barbpenyahoocom@69.28.186.121>,
> Adrienne Boswell <arbpen2003@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > Maybe. For me, it's a writing style. I write just about everything
> > (markup/scripting) in lower case, with the exception of SQL keywords.
>
> Well, I was wondering if, when we do this, it works fine only by
> the grace of browsers (which might not be actually obliged to
> recognise a font name in lower case?

The way in which a user agent matches a CSS font-family description
with one of the available fonts is deliberately not specified in
detail: it's left to implementers to decide how to make the best
match. For example, what should happen if the CSS specifies "Times",
and the user has "Times New Roman" (and not "Times")?

It stands to reason, though, that if a font is named "FooBar", then
the *best* way to match it, across different browsers and font
management systems, is by specifying "FooBar", rather than maybe
"foobar" or "Foobar" or "FOOBAR".

> URLs are case sensitive and occur in css, they will not always work
> well (online) if the capital letters that are "supposed" to be in
> them are rendered as lower case.

This kind of analogy is not, in general, helpful. One has to consult
the actual specifications to know what is intended[1]

Sure: URLs are case-sensitive, by definition. But font name matching
is not so clearly defined.

> (sensibly, what would be the chance of 2 fonts, verdana and Verdana)

Well, I've got a font family called "Monospace". CSS understands
monospace as a font keyword. They aren't (necessarily) the same font.
And the browsers know it.

h t h

[1] and then, I'm afraid, one usually has to examine MS's Operating
System Component, to see which of the mandatory requirements they
decided to break *this* time - fortunately, the other browser
developers can't afford to spit in the face of the specifications in
that way, so there's normally only that one troublemaker to worry
about.

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