But this technique isn’t correcting for some kind of mistake the typographer theoretically made, it’s adjusting for the fact that CSS sizes by the bounding box instead of the em-height. The font itself is unchanged and renders exactly how it’s designed, this just lets us use it in a more intuitive way.
IMO sizing by bounding-box was the wrong move in the original CSS spec, but that’s how digital type renderers have worked going back to the eighties, so the whole thing was probably too entrenched in the first place. And I have no idea if font standards of the day even had em-heights encoded in a way that could be read in font metadata.
Anyway, this whole feature is news to me, can’t wait to try it. Between this and text-box-trim (life changing), I’ve never been happier with web design.
I wish it were this simple.
The em square != the bounding box of all glyphs. The em square is defined by the font's ascent & descent vertical metrics, which are set by the font designer.
There are reasons why you might want glyphs to escape the em square. Perhaps you're typesetting English text without accent marks above capitals, and using the bounding box's vertical maximum would introduce too much line space. Or perhaps you're using a decorative font which is designed to escape the em square, and potentially even overlap the em squares of lines above and below, like this: https://alangrow.com/images/blog/script-font-escaping-em-squ...
To make matters worse, and mostly for legacy reasons, there are THREE different sets of ascent & descent metrics in a font file. Which is used depends on your OS and the software rendering the font. But the Webfont Strategy described here is a nice one, because you can use the bounding box (winAscent & winDescent) if you really need to, say because any glyph might be used and you want to avoid em square escape: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/vertical-metrics
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.