Thanks Amir for kicking this off!
A general point I wanted to make off the back of this... when adding things to the mobile site, no matter how minimal a module is we should get in the discipline habit of thinking "Does everyone need this module?" We should be extremely careful what JavaScript and CSS modules we add to mobile users, especially when modules are not useful to certain users.
In this case I would recommend checking if the language needs WebFonts before adding the module to the page. Another key thing we are doing on mobile now is making use of mw.loader.using to conditionally load JavaScript - this is another useful trick :-).
On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 10:49 PM, Yuvi Panda yuvipanda@gmail.com wrote:
Forwarded to wikitech-l
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il Date: Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 10:38 AM Subject: [WikimediaMobile] webfonts in mobile frontend To: "mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org" mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi,
So today I worked with Kaldari (thanks for the help!!) and committed a very simple module to enable webfonts support in MobileFrontend: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/86340/ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/86337/
Review and any comments are very welcome, of course.
The current implementation is very simple. It doesn't allow any configuration or choice of fonts - if there is a default font for the language, it is used wherever there's a lang attribute or a style or a class the sets a font explicitly. (Some languages, like Tamil and Hebrew have fonts, but they are not default, so none are used). It may be worth optimizing it, for example:
- Only loading the font of the content language to save time and
bandwidth. (Loading additional fonts can be an option.)
- Only loading fonts on devices that are known to have bad font
support. On iPhone and it's pretty for many languages. On the latest Windows Mobile version it's very good. On Android below 4.0, however, it's very bad: most languages of India are completely unreadable, which is the main reason to do this (the same goes for languages of Ethiopia, South-East Asia and some others). Android 4 and above is not always perfect either.
I'd love to hear more considerations about bandwidth, performance, testing etc.
Thanks!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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-- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog
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