On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 02:56:42PM -0700, S Page wrote:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Prioritizing freely licensed fonts while also explicitly naming the preferred non-free fonts seems like an easy fix.
Again, this is already done for us by fontconfig when presented with the ASCII sequence "H e l v e t i c a". There's no reason for our font stack to do it unless some freely-licensed font looks better than the non-free font; also it will work against the brave and few who follow steps like http://www.binarytides.com/gorgeous-looking-fonts-ubuntu-linux/ to adjust the appearance of those well-known names.
The problem with relying on fontconfig instead of being explicit about your choices, is that it's basically undefined behavior. On my system fontconfig chooses Liberation Sans, on yours it might choose Roboto, etc.
Maybe the designer doesn't care about which font is used as long as it's Sans Serif, but in this case why would the CSS say "Helvetica" instead of "sans-serif"? IOW, if one wants to be explicit about their font choices, they might just as well be explicit across platforms.
(I don't know much about web design though, I could be wrong :)
Regards, Faidon