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. Obviously, if a browser doesn't support CSS, it's going to ignore whatever we put in a CSS file (Arial-only, both, whatever).
I've no real opinion in any direction, mind you, except that I want to make sure we serve the greatest selection of users possible.
I agree, and no one is suggesting we just put Liberation Sans. The way font-family fallbacks work is well-established, cross-browser, and goes back to CSS 1 (and IE *3*, just to give you an idea). It just picks the first font in the list that it can render.
(Fwiw, the reason Arial was chosen was because a) it's sans-serif and b) it's available on a massive percentage of machines in toto.)
True, but there's no need to pick just one. A lot of sites use font-family chains. At least, we should probably have sans-serif at the end of the chain.
Matt Flaschen