On 27-10-2013 20:37, Steven Walling wrote:
Many FOSS communities have dealt with the trade off between great-looking fonts and freedom by commissioning foundries to get their own free fonts. See also: Ubuntu, Android, and more. I've talked to the design team about this idea, including perhaps getting a foundry to donate a unique font stack in exchange for the publicity they'd get.
Those FOSS communities distribute software such as operating systems; you cannot compare them to websites like Wikipedia. The MediaWiki software generate those websites. So I think the comparison is not acurate.
Whould MediaWiki commision it's own font? No; too expensive/time consuming. Could we possibly use an existing free (web) font? Possibly, but it will cost extra bandwidth serving them. That leaves using fonts that are available on readers' systems.
Whoever said that typography is not important, is totally wrong; it is an inseparable part of web design. Avoiding proprietary fonts is just as pointless as avoiding proprietary web browsers.
Met vriendelijke groet,