faces vs. fonts

[Agreenbl]

Hi,
   This is probably more of a misfeature than a bug,
but I'll let you folks be the judge of that.
   In Emacs 21.1, the :font attribute for a face is
described as semi-obsolete; users are instead encouraged
to set the :family, :width, :height, :weight, and
:slant attributes to get the same effect.
   I'm led to think (by set-face-attribute) that I can
change these properties on the default face, and that 
these changes will then take effect in subsequently
created frames.
   Instead, make-frame ignores the default face.  So,
if my newly created frame lacks a font parameter, it
uses some hardcoded default like 
"-adobe-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" (see xfns.c), and
constructs a default face based off of that.
   So then I have to either:
   1) keep font info in two formats -- 1 for faces and
1 for the font keyword to make-frame, or
   2) reset the default face for newly created frames
to reflect my preferences
   This seems clumsy.

   Thanks for working on Emacs!
   Adam Greenblatt agreenbl@aol.com