2013/1/6 Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org
On 01/05/2013 11:17 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
Does anyone have a legitimate, realistic, technically sound reason why "Libertine Sans" should be chosen over Arial other than "it's free and open sourced"?
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Have we thought about all of the technical issues (such as being readable in ancient browsers, or even browsers that don't support css)?
Ancient browsers (and the computers they're on) will almost certainly not have Liberation Sans, so it will just skip over it harmlessly.
Yes, and this is a fine solution for Latin-based languages.
Also, the Free licensing of Liberation Sans makes it *possible* to be used in the WebFonts and Universal Language Selector extensions. It can be optional, of course; for example, for English it can be optional, but for more exotic languages, like Lingala or Igbo, it can be made available as a web font. In this regard it is better than Arial, because its character inventory is richer.
And finally, the usual reminder from Language engineering: this only solves the issue for Latin-, Cyrillic-, and Greek-based languages. They constitute a large chunk of the languages we serve, but they are many that Liberation Sans doesn't cover. So our CSS must be language-aware, and not just in non-English projects, but in all of them. (This probably deserves another thread.)
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