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