Naming of “legacy” accents

Glyphs
1

I am currently teaching a workshop in which I talked about the difference between spacing and combining accents. It seems that Glyphs lists spacing accents under a “legacy” label.

As far as I understand, these accents are seen in exactly one situation – when using a keyboard’s “dead keys” (before the accented glyph is ultimately formed).

I wonder what makes these accents to be classified as “legacy”. I’d argue that a font without them would be perceived as faulty. In my mind, “legacy” equates “outdated”, perhaps just “spacing accents” would be enough?

2

That is a good point. If I remember correctly, there were some deprecated use cases for them and that’s why we labeled it like this.

3

I guess they were called legacy to discourage users to use them for precomposed components? Otherwise I don’t see anything obsolete about them.