text-rendering: optimizeLegibility is broken on Android 2.3

[kpeatt]

Not that this is necessarily the biggest concern but this property actively breaks text rendering on Android 2.3 and lower. You end up with what looks like a lot of broken Unicode characters on screen or just missing text.

Some links:

• https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15067
• http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bandroid%5D+optimizelegibility
• https://twitter.com/jasonsantamaria/status/453589484765212672

[kennethormandy]

This is pretty important! I will have to see if there’s a better way to conditionally use it without relying on trmix, but either way I guess I should drop it. Kerning support on some platforms at the expense of missing text on others isn’t really worth it, especially in a normalizing project. Thanks for the thorough issue report!

[kennethormandy]

I haven’t figured out what is best yet, but for now supporting Android 2.3 and maintaining letter-spacing support on Android 4.0 seems more important than adding kerning and basic ligatures on iOS 6 and desktop Safari, so I’ve removed text-rendering.

[kennethormandy]

I’m still happy with the decision to remove text-rendering so I’m closing the issue. I don’t want to encourage its use, and I don’t think it’s a property that should have an opinion on OpenType features anyway. Thanks a lot for the heads up on this, @kpeatt!