Get the latest tech news
What you can get out of a high-quality font
Different weights are cool, but the real question is whether your font can swash.
Axes names (and other OpenType features) consist of 4 characters, and the most popular one is wght which controls the font's weight. And while it's definitely more readable, this approach has the same problem with cascading, as defining font-variant-alternates on an element will overwrite the parent value instead of extending it, so in any case, you'll need to do tricks with CSS variables to work around this issue. Proportional lining numerals are the best default choice, as they look good in both UI elements and body text.
Or read this on Hacker News