Oldstyle numerals make texts harder to read

[Minoru]

@ForNeVeR notes that on Windows, with Constantia font, the body of my posts are hard-ish to read. I double-checked that, and indeed there are some problems:

• in Z-00:11, the numbers are "lowercase", the whole thing looks pretty weird
• in mr146, the digit 1 is "lowercase" too, and looks very similar to i.

(Sorry, didn't think of taking some screenshots of that).

Short-term solution is to disable oldstyle numerals everywhere. Long-term solutions might be any of:

• provide a way to selectively switch oldstyle numerals on and off, so I can use them in the body, but selectively disable them in cases like those mentioned above
• using a single (web-)font on all OSes, to make it easier for me to test and spot such problems

[Minoru]

Short-term solution is to disable oldstyle numerals everywhere.

Turns out I can't really do it everywhere.

First of all, Georgia font differs between mscorefonts and Windows 10. Georgia from mscorefonts (as installed by ttf-mscorefonts-installer package) does not contain lining numerals. Non-Windows users

Secondly, font-variant-numeric property is not supported by Internet Explorer.

Thirdly, browsers that do support the property do not apply it to the list markers. That's right: even if I attach the property to the \ tag itself, lists are still numbered with an old-style numerals. The only way to style the marker is via the ::marker selector, which as of today is only supported out-of-the-box by Firefox and Safari; Chrome and Edge hide it behind the feature flag; IE doesn't support it at all. The "best" workaround is to hide default markers and create your own.

Ugh.

So the short-term solution is really a half-assed workaround: employ both the property and the selector, realizing that this leaves some readers out in the cold. The real solution to this mess is shipping my own webfont that contains just the things I want (filed #43 regarding this).