As the "someone" also behind component alpha, the rationale was without it, we would have had quite significant visual regressions when we introduced layers for text (especially in Windows XP where proper Cleartype rendering was really important and expected by users).
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Replying to @rocallahan @Gankra_
As for SVG fonts, for which I am also largely responsible: I guess demand for fancier glyphs than those supported by COLR hasn't really emerged, so mea culpa.
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Replying to @rocallahan @Gankra_
If and when it does, I hope people just use SVG instead of redesigning SVG as OpenType features one feature at a time.
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Replying to @rocallahan @Gankra_
And FWIW there is no need to be discreet by repeatedly referring to "someone" :-)
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Replying to @rocallahan
I mean, for partial-ligatures I linked your post on it, so I wasn't obscuring anything. The others I genuinely wasn't sure it was you (although they all have the a distinct "roc went on an adventure" signature).
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Replying to @Gankra_ @rocallahan
Everything I discussed except the the partial ligature work turned out to be a bad gamble, but they were reasonable considerations at the time. They stand out to me because they were bizarre friction points I ran into when bringing up webrender which no other browser did.
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Replying to @Gankra_
I don't see a clear case that component alpha was a "bad gamble". Its useful life probably ended a while ago but that doesn't necessarily mean it was net detrimental.
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Replying to @rocallahan
As we've pushed into high resolutions driven by relatively weak gpus, and pages have started producing more nasty layers, the extra memory/bandwidth footprint from component alpha appears to actually be causing problems. Also no one else ever bothered doing it, right?
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Replying to @Gankra_ @rocallahan
Is the extra memory/bandwidth from component alpha theoretically necessary or is it just a consequence of GL 3 blend modes being overly limited? (I forget how component alpha works)
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It’s worth remembering that we in the browser space are in a weird situation where we can’t rely on anything past D3D9 level functionality which is from 2002 (!!) When I talk to game developers about this they’re often aghast.
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Component alpha needs 6 bytes per pixel rather than 4. That's fundamental extra overhead. I don't remember how it's implemented in the GPU compositors.
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Replying to @rocallahan @pcwalton
I haven't dug into it much since I ran into the problems it seemed to be causing, because I've been on leave.
@markusstange described the current implementation as basically a 2x penalty, as we combined "text on black" and "text on white" rasterizations or something?1 reply 0 retweets 1 like - 1 more reply
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