css.properties.font-variant-alternates and css.at-rules.font-feature-values - Safari doesn’t actually support it, Chromium now does

[chris-morgan]

What type of issue is this?

Incorrect support data (ex. Chrome says "86" but support was added in "40")

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

1. That Safari has supported it since 9.1.
2. That Chrome doesn’t support it.

What browsers does this problem apply to, if applicable?

Chromium (Chrome, Edge 79+, Opera, Samsung Internet), Safari

What did you expect to see?

1. That Safari does not support @font-feature-values/font-variant-alternates (it doesn’t currently, and I don’t believe it ever did).
2. That Chrome supports it from 111 onwards.

Did you test this? If so, how?

https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2023-03-09-font-feature-values-demo/

(Also other easy tests like CSSFontFeatureValuesRule or CSS.supports('font-variant-alternates', 'styleset(x)').)

Can you link to any release notes, bugs, pull requests, or MDN pages related to this?

• Safari non-support: [css-fonts-4] font-feature-settings don’t cascade w3c/csswg-drafts#552 (comment) confirms that six months after Safari 9.1 Safari didn’t support @font-feature-values. I have not found any reason to believe it ever did.
• Chromium having just landed it in M111: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=716567

Do you have anything more you want to share?

This affects both css.properties.font-variant-alternates and css.at-rules.font-feature-values.

MDN URL

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-variant-alternates

MDN metadata

MDN page report details

• Query: css.properties.font-variant-alternates
• Report started: 2023-03-09T10:42:08.609Z

[gsnedders]

This is, alas, one of the limitations of how BCD currently models data:

Safari 9.1 supports font-variant-alternates with the value space normal | historical-forms.

These test results should make it obvious that Safari 16.2 did introduce support, which shows that it does in fact currently have support—as BCD currently documents for the various functions.

[gsnedders]

css.at-rules.font-feature-values

Oh I missed you were also talking about that—yeah, that's definitely wrong claiming Safari 9.1 has support. (It's also less surprising that it's wrong—because mdn-bcd-collector doesn't generate results for css.at-rules, and thus it's much more reliant on human editing/research, which is… much more fallible).

[chris-morgan]

Hmm, I think I accidentally tangled things up as part of reporting, in thinking there were two affected things. Also I somehow missed the whole Safari 16.2 thing.

Well then: #18529 fixed font-variant-alternates, it’s now correct, but css.at-rules.font-feature-values is still incorrect, so let’s restrict the scope of this report to just that.

[chris-morgan]

Actually, no, css.properties.font-variant-alternates is still wrong for Chromium, #18529 just fixed the Safari error.

Sigh. This is what comes of trying to report problems with two browsers in two different areas in the one report: you get at least one of the four combinations wrong! 🙂

[queengooborg]

Chrome data is all fixed in #19520!