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Finally catching up on this! But is there no syntax for "trim at the edge of the current text, whatever it is?" Some fonts have characters that don't fit neatly on the cap/ex lines…

Love the post! Thank you! Question: Is it possible to apply some sort of prefers-reduced-motion rules to the page to stop the animations or only play them on hover? I realize this might be a platform thing, not post thing, of course.

oh like the video's from auto playing? a very hot/cold UX thing; some folks love it and some hate it you could try an extension that pauses all video/gifs on a page, regardless of muted autoplay but no, OS's / prefers reduced motion doesnt do anything for autoplaying gifs or videos. not yet?!

Yep, exactly! Applying reduced motion at the OS level doesn't do anything for that page, unfortunately. I'll have to take a look if there are extensions, but I thought I'd ask in the mean time to see if it were possible for the chrome blog, since it's a fairly standard place for really good stuff.

Ooh - finally enabled by default in both Chrome 133 and Safari 18.2? 🎉 It really is a quantum leap in web typography. I'll be looking forward to removing the text-box emulation I've been using (which renders exactly like the real text-box implementations 🙏)... in a couple of years 🫡

Is there an equivalent for the X-axis? Dealing with a particularly annoying left edge alignment issue using a specific font face and wanting to avoid negative left margin on all headings

there isnt… a couple variable fonts have a setting for it, but it's super rare. in my Super Rad Design demo i use margin-inline: -.1ch or some "magic value" like that to fix this inline space. the engineer and i researched this more and we don't know of a good way to expose this space

Thanks, appreciate the insight. It’s an issue I think I’ve encountered only a handful of times in my entire career and almost always with a dodgy webfont. margin-inline is a totally reasonable “hack” in this case!

this is one of those things, when you realize how important this is, you have to ask... why did CSS have such a weird, awkward text model to begin with?? 😅 this is super effin cool, I'm so excited this is finally landing. now we just need Firefox and Edge to pick it up. 😁

okay, but that changed at least 20 years ago, when web design started becoming important how did it take 20+ years before someone realized how fonts work and decided to fix the web 😅

It's most likely a matter of priority. We didn't need hacks to put readable text on a page, we did need them for layout up until flexbox in 2010. All the things we're getting now in 2025 are honestly nice to haves.

Very cool! Any developer who works off Adobe XD reference files should be shouting at Firefox all day long about getting this adopted. The text boxes in XD made pixel-pretty-close a mathematical puzzle involving font-height (half, if memory serves?) and neighboring columns paddings/margins. No more!

1. they aren't! 2. there isn't… and i've heavily researched this as I also wanted to trim the inline sides. some variable fonts offer a setting that has this information. but it's like 0.07% of the variable fonts we looked at. until then, we'll `margin-inline: -.25ch` or something