As @aaronbell points out, if we're always aiming for compatibility across existing environments, some of which have been doing the wrong thing for three decades, we're never going to get to a better place where environments behave compatibly. /8
Agree! It’s no fun on our side, either. We have hacks in our code that serve no other purpose than to perpetuate hacks that existed elsewhere before, and that people naturally started relying on.
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Programmers are really good at solving problems and making things 'work', which isn't always a good thing. Once upon a time, someone at Microsoft used Win metrics for linespacing, and that seemed to work, so they and their colleagues decided that was the thing to do.

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The frustrating thing is that the Typo and Win metrics had been separately defined in OS/2 precisely to avoid having linespacing and clipping handled by the same values. The Typo metrics had always been intended to be used for linespacing: the best choice, and the least used.
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