On 4/7/14, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Erwin Dokter
<erwin(a)darcoury.nl> wrote:
I feel that I am not being taken seriously. Three
times now I have
indicated what is wrong with this solution, namely that a single font
stack
cannot possibly serve a global website.
I want to ask Steven and Jon how they plan on serving *all* the scripts
and languages in the world in a *single* font stack. There is not a single
font in existence that can possibly support all languages.
I think we actually answered this up front at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh#Is_there_a_perfect_font_t…
Ultimately we're shooting for and getting a lot more consistency and
control over the user experience here, for most users. That doesn't meant
that it's perfect. There is definitely not a single font that is available
everywhere that supports all languages. That's why it's a font stack with
fallbacks. We definitely don't gain more consistency across the experience
by moving back to a situation where the styles basically just define no
style.
No you don't get more consistency by moving back to an experience
where you let the browser determine fonts. However you do get a
situation where things are more likely to work for non-latin scripts
(and other issues that have been brought up, if I understand
correctly). Consistency and actually working for all scripts are
separate goals. If you can't satisfy both, you're going to have to
make one take higher priority than the other. I personally consider
the "Actually working for all languages" to be much more important
consideration than consistency.
Which is not to say its impossible to satisfy both. Maybe it is, maybe
it isn't (Not really my area of knowledge). But from what I hear,
currently we are not satisfying both.
--bawolff