alt Hacker News> There are only three places where I hold letter-spacing of any kind to be acceptable:
Three more that I'm aware of:
4. For emphasis in Fraktur text [0].
5. In very small amounts (< 2%) to improve paragraph breaking [1 §7.2].
6. For very large signs where readability is more important than aesthetics [2, 3].
These are all rather special cases though, so I still agree with your general point.
[0]: https://unifraktur.sourceforge.net/en/letterspacing.html
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf#page=95
[2]: https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/SHSe/Alphabets.pdf#%5B%7B%22num%2...
[3]: https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/SHSe/shs_2004_2012_sup.pdf#SHS%20...
I should clarify that I speak only of English and general web content CSS. I’m happy to disqualify 4 and 6 on those grounds (you decide which grounds I use for Fraktur!).
As for 5, I’m not convinced letter-spacing is the right tool for it: at those scales I’ve tended to prefer condensing or expanding the text, glyphs and all, which you can do in SVG. But I will allow it as a place where very careful letter-spacing use with kerning and ligature control can be acceptable.