Explore options for standardizing and extending theme.json design tokens for typography

[glendaviesnz]

What problem does this address?

Background discussion.

On the above issue, there was some consensus that there would be value in exploring the options for standardizing and extending theme.json design tokens in relation to typography.

This blog post provides a good introduction to some of the reasons for this.

This is intended to be a top-level issue for some of the initial discussions, with a number of smaller issues likely needed to prototype/progress the work.

[richtabor]

I'm not 100% sure, but what if core applied slugs autonomously for font sizes — instead of the theme providing unique slugs (i.e. small, medium, etc)?

Core's "slugs" could be integers, 1, 2, etc — so when a theme registers font sizes, it would register 1 as the smallest, and as many as they'd prefer (or there's a standardization cap, where if you go over it's unlikely to map to another theme's typography?).

And if I switch a theme, the 1 slugs (i.e. the smallest font size) should map as the smallest preset font size.

[glendaviesnz]

Core's "slugs" could be integers, 1, 2

This would match better with what is being discussed for standardisation of spacing slugs, where a numeric slug seems to be the preferred approach. For spacing a 10,20,30 approach has been suggested for slugs to make it easier for themes to slot additional options between any core defaults.

[mrwweb]

I think the other question around this is how do you set the default font size? It seems like the default should come first and then smaller and larger sizes on the scale go out from there.

My concern about 10/20/30 is that this might encourage themes to include too many values or think of the numbers as pixel sizes. --font-size--24 (or whatever) should almost never be set to 24px in this system. I think that's the big advantage of the single digit integer approach.

And I think @richtabor has a really interesting thought about normalizing font slugs. If we know the default, then everything else could just expand out from there in single steps.