On 08/04/14 06:57, S Page wrote:
In https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124475/ (go back to sans-serif) Legoktm claims "There was a consensus that listing only non-free fonts was not acceptable", that's not my recollection. Was a bug ever filed?
Kaldari valiantly tried to put non-free fonts first, that caused bug 63512. Now as I understand it, we're back to:
- Mac users get Helvetica Neue
- Windows users get Arial unless they have Helvetica Neue (unlikely) or
Helvetica (I can't reproduce bug 63662)
- Linux users get whatever F/OSS font fontconfig supplies for the
well-known string "Helvetica", I get Nimbus Sans L
- Android users ?? (Nobody responded.)
Linux often gets arial. Anyone with wine will probably have it installed, too, and most will have wine even if they don't use it. It's not necessarily a particularly good copy, either.
quoting Isarra Yos
Given that no objective and verifiable issues with this were ever provided ... Why? All this effort, and for what?
BECAUSE DESIGN. (I begged and pleaded with the talented designers who work next to me to put something emphatic in the Typography refresh FAQ.) It's a better design. It makes MediaWiki web sites look better for millions of our users by mentioning proprietary fonts that 90+% of them have. That's not "objective and verifiable", it just is. Is it worth mentioning non-free fonts? People disagree. But I'm saddened by the implicit and overt hostility towards the art of design here ("its debatable whether this actually represents "progress"", "it seems like things have shifted more to managers at WMF make the decisions", etc.).
Saying something is 'better' doesn't make it so. There are real reasons behind why anything is better than something else, or it would not be better. Even art in general is not purely subjective; if it were, we wouldn't hire artists and designers at all because it would be just as subjective to them and everyone would have different views and it'd just be hopeless.
Good design is good because it plays to the way our brains work. Even without a background in neuroscience, artists and designers learn over time what works and why, and they often take classes to enumerate the concepts as well. These are concepts they should be referring to here, things about the composition, the contrast, the use of space, the interplay between the colours. You can't just say this painting did this 'because design' and expect anyone to take you seriously. You can, however, say that the added negative space helps to emphasise the subject, drawing attention away from that place in the background where someone punched a hole through the canvas. They may still not take you seriously because then they know you punched a hole in the canvas, but it's a real, understandable reason.
But there's more that needs to go into something like this beyond just the general principles of design - this isn't a painting, but a thing that people use. So what of the users themselves? What of the languages that it will be in, the disabilities that need to be accommodated, the hardware on which it will be displayed, the software that will be rendering it to the end user, and the principles we uphold? How is it better in these respects, and for these?
'Just is' doesn't fly. There is so much more to design than that, and to suggest otherwise discredits those who make it their passion.
-I