WICG
Is `local font access` a current, ongoing work item?
I see criticism of local font access by TAG, in 2022 and a comment in 2021 stating that the explainer would be updated to add a more privacy-preserving picker-style API rather than a complete font enumeration.
I also see that the explainer was last updated in 2022 and includes Requesting specific fonts so it looks as if that work was done. But TAG review was not re-started.
I'm raising this issue to try and distinguish between three plausible explanations:
- The API needs more work before re-requesting TAG review
- The work has been done, but TAG criticism still holds
- The API has been abandoned, no further work should be expected
I'm asking the status because:
- Web Fonts WG was asked to look at this work, when rechartering recently
- CSS WG was directed to this work, in the context of an opt-out from tightening local font access in general
- https://github.com/w3c/charter-drafts/issues/647
- https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/11775
I am no longer involved with this. @chrishtr might be a better contact now.
For what it's worth, the Ruffle Flash emulator would benefit a lot from an API like this. As the name implies, we're emulating Adobe Flash Player, which had two ways to use fonts: embedding them and using system fonts. Embedded fonts work fine on web and we were able to make system fonts work on desktop, but on web the emulator renders the SWF content in a canvas element, and it is impossible with existing web technologies to use system fonts for that, so we just have a few default fonts (which can be missing things the animation used such as CJK and Cyrillic characters).
We offer website owners the ability to configure URLs of font files on the web to use instead when the animation requests a specific system font, but legally website owners can only put certain font files on their websites, and this option is not really possible to implement for the web extension version of Ruffle.
