Consider using ‘base’ over ‘regular’ in font weight

[jonathantneal]

In the current set of tokens, a base value is used for font sizes, line heights, letter spacings, and even radii and backgrounds. However, font weight does not follow this pattern and instead uses regular.

• Should font weights follow the same convention?
• If not, how would we describe what makes font weight unique?
• Or, should the ‘base’ naming convention be something else entirely?

.hypothetical-example-based-on-font-heading-1 {
  --font-heading-1-font-weight: var(--font-weight-base);
}

[markacianfrani]

I love the idea of being consistent with base. I'm not sure if we've explicitly laid out what that word means in our design language.

Font weight is a separate concept from font size, line height, etc though. It's not really a scale, but there's an argument there if we talk about them in terms of 400,500,600,700, etc. I think the decision to use regular was made to reflect how Figma/designers talk about font weight.

I'll defer to @amalyah and @steveg-rocket here. I like this as long as it makes sense to designers

[amalyah]

For the font weight, regular actually means something to design. It’s a setting we actually have to manually choose, so for our understanding, I would prefer regular. However, we could just call it two different things in dev and design if the urge is strong enough.

[amalyah]

Hmmm on the other hand, if we ever needed to change our main font weight to something else, base would be the safer term...That does mean, however, that the other font weight variables would have to have generic enough names to be okay with their weights shifting as well.

[markacianfrani]

Sounds like we should have a new system (alias) token for font-weight-base then that references the font-weight-regular reference token.

The reference tokens shouldn't infer any usage.

[jonathantneal]

I would second that implementation, @markacianfrani. That sounds good!

[markacianfrani]

Would a font-weight-base token be something we need now? or can we punt this until we have a real need for it? I just want to make sure we don't prematurely promote new tokens to the global namespace. Do we anticipate ever needing to change the base font weight across the entire system?

[amalyah]

We wouldn't change it for a while is my guess. I don't have any particular reason we would want to, but it's always possible. I'm fine with punting it as long as it doesn't create a breaking change for us later.