On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 5:40 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
I've read through this thread and I've
formulated two questions:
* Is there consensus to specify "font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica,
Arial, sans-serif;" in MediaWiki core?
I am going to be annoying and answer your question with a question:
consensus among who? How do make a decision like this?
On the one hand, you have Wikimedia users, who don't really care about the
appearance of promoting FOSS or not. They just want to things to work and
look good. They also believe that the only consensus that matters is the
one on their local wiki. They could honestly care less what the
conglomeration of volunteer and staff developers think their internal
consensus is. And mostly, even when something is a consensus decision based
on an RFC/discussion, the Wikimedia Foundation gets the blame (as we
should).
On the other hand, we have MediaWiki developers, some of whom would rather
throw up their hands and not specify a real font stack, rather than touch
the non-free fonts *most users already have* with a ten foot pole. They
seem to think that an RFC or discussion on Wikitech-l is what represents a
consensus that must be respected. And they don't feel responsible for what
gets released on Wikimedia sites necessarily.
We can gain more consistent, accessible typography across languages with an
iterative approach that continues to build on what we've done over the last
five months. Or we can go back to the drawing board to try and please
everyone, which is an impossibility if you ever want to make progress.
* Is there an issue with specifying "font-family:
sans-serif;" in
MediaWiki core?
Do you mean just for body type as Odder proposed in
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124475/, or for everything?
Steven