On 05/03/14 14:51, Max wrote:

Hey Isarra, that's some good questions.
I'll try to answer as concise as possible, but in case you're interested, here's the detailed version: https://gist.github.com/awesomephant/9352699

> Why would this be the best experience?
In our case, a good experience means being able to *read stuff* and understand the content as easy as possible. Therefore, a typographic setup that makes reading as easy as possible makes for a good experience.

But why would this be the best for that? How do we know it's easier?

> But why would we, for an interface for an online encyclopedia and similar, need something so specific at all?
Our goal is to help people get information they need by reading articles. It makes sense to make reading an article as easy as possible, because ultimately that will help people understand the content. The typeface is an important part of good typography and should be chosen carefully, even though there's other factors such as spacing and size that need to be considered.

When operating systems determine their font renderers, do they completely neglect to consider any of this? Are the system interfaces and other applications illegible because they chose bad fonts and didn't consider spacing and size? Because that would be somewhat surprising unless it's a bunch of non-toolkit apps in twm or something. Otherwise, though, things are probably fine.

And I'd put forward that one of the biggest factors in what people find easy to read is what they're used to reading. Consider how people usually complain the most when something changes, regardless of how it changes. Consider how I love DejaVu Sans' width and miss it when I'm on windows, despite how the narrower windows default Arial renders just fine there (it doesn't render well at all in smaller sizes on a lot of linux), whereas a mac user I know who was used to Helvetica/Arial thought DejaVu Sans' width was ridiculous and wondered how I could even tolerate it. Consider handwriting - you would probably have some difficulty reading my handwriting, and yet I have no trouble at all with it so long as all of the letters are there. Consider cursive vs print - people who aren't used to reading/writing in cursive often have trouble reading that as well, to the point where some simply can't.

On computers and other devices, what people are usually most used to reading is what the system uses. Because that means most of the things on the system will also be using it.

> If there is a very specific 'right font', why aren't we using it as a webfont?
I think webfonts are amazing, and we should definitely use them. However, even with webfonts using a font stack is a good idea. What if the user has an old browser that doesn't support webfonts? What if the user chose not to download font files to save bandwidth? In those cases we still want to do our best to ensure a decent reading experience, which isn't always possible with the default fallbacks.
Our font stack would look something like this:
'Fancy pants Webfont Pro', DejaVu Sans, Arial, sans-serif;

Webfonts may be amazing, but that does not necessarily mean they are a good idea to use in most cases. Game-related sites and anything else maintaining the look and feel of a certain theme/genre are good use cases, as well as when you need character support and don't expect your users to necessarily have anything installed for it (ULS does this), but without a specific need for them, I would argue webfonts are best avoided entirely. The problems they pose are huge:

• The cross-platform rendering issues that are normally encountered with locally installed fonts can become much more severe (this appears in particular in windows and especially chrome where the weight handling can render a webfont completely illegible)
• Download sizes are an issue
• When you need to handle support for multiple character sets it quickly becomes problematic (and on top of that, an improperly set up webfont can even kill a system's normal fallback handling for unsupported character sets)

That last bit could probably be mitigated/resolved by RL by only serving up relevant character sets for the page in question, but such is unfortunately a decent way off from being implemented.

The others, too, can be overcome or deemed acceptable if there's a real need, but is there here?

> Why did the generic 'serif' and 'sans-serif' become insufficient?
They were in fact never sufficient. But for quite some time, web technology didn't allow us to do it better. Now that it does (with webfonts and finer typographic control), why shouldn't we go ahead and improve our user experience?

Never were sufficient? Prove it. What's the evidence?

Hope that answered your questions, feel free to hit me up if something isn't clear.

Best, max.
@awesomephant

All that said, I do appreciate the response.

-I

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