[whatwg] Font metrics

[Greg Brown]

OK, that makes sense. Thanks for the info.

On Apr 2, 2010, at 5:39 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Apr 2010, Greg Brown wrote:
>> 
>> In reviewing the current draft API for the <canvas> element 
>> (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-canvas-element.html), 
>> I noticed that there is no support for obtaining font metrics such as 
>> ascent, descent, leading, and bounding box. It seems like the most 
>> recent discussion regarding font metrics took place a couple of years 
>> ago:
>> 
>> http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-May/014706.html
>> 
>> But even that thread refers to discussions from 2006.
>> 
>> I would personally like to see support for these values added to the 
>> API. Is this something that could be considered for the final spec? What 
>> are the major obstacles to providing such support? I would think that 
>> this information could be easily obtained using the underlying graphics 
>> API, but maybe I am missing something.
> 
> It's something we'll probably add in due course, but for now we're waiting 
> for the existing canvas API stuff to be implemented properly. We can't add 
> too much stuff at once, because if we do the browser vendors get so far 
> behind that they end up either rushing to catch up (leading to more bugs), 
> or skipping parts in order to get the rest done right (leading to parts of 
> the spec being ignored).
> 
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'