On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 11:42 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński <matma.rex(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
I have merged the Gerrit change
(
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/
r/#/c/124475/),
restoring the body font to "sans-serif". The heading font is unchanged for
now.
I've read the entire wikitech-l thread (89 emails as of writing) and
pondered this carefully. My summary of the situation is:
* This font stack, according to WMF Design, only provides real
improvements for Macs (~6% of Wikimedia sites visitors per
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/
SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm>)
and should be (nearly) identical to defaults for other systems.
However, it causes major rendering issues for an unspecified number
of Windows and Linux users (especially with, respectively, Helvetica
and Nimbus Sans L; see both open and closed dependencies of bug
63549).
* This font stack also apparently causes issues with non-Latin-script
languages (not very well-specified ones, though; more bug reports
like bug 63817 would be welcome); it's serious enough for at least
one affected Wikimedia wiki (the Japanese Wikipedia) to have already
reset the stack to "sans-serif". This might affect the serif heading
fonts more than the sans-serif body fonts (again, more precise
reports needed).
* The wikitech-l discussion, as well as various on-wiki discussions
(e.g. on WP:VPT on the English Wikipedia) have been overwhelmingly
in favor of restoring the plain "sans-serif" font definition.
* Orthogonally to these issues, all other aspects of the typography
refresh have been generally considered successful and minor problems
with them have been quickly fixed.
Based on the points above and my own common sense I think this should
be merged, and a similar follow-up for serif heading fonts might also
be necessary (but that's obviously a lower-severity problem, there
isn't that much text in headings). Steven, I'm sorry, but I'm
overriding your -2.
(I'm posting this on the Gerrit change
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124475/>, on the tracking bug
<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63549> and in the
wikitech-l thread. Please reply on wikitech-l.)
Replicating what I wrote on the patch:
Bartosz: thanks for the considered, factual take on the matter. I
appreciate you taking the time to read up on everything though obviously I
disagree about Nimbus Sans L and Helvetica Neue not being improvements.
I would caution against being English Wikipedia centric in talking about
user acceptance of the new typography. Spanish Wikipedia is far less
aligned against it (
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votaciones/2014/Sobre_la_actualizac…)
and other wikis (German, French) have declined to open a vote on the matter
while they wait for continued tweaks from us. I posted in the other thread
Erwin started about our plan for dealing with serifs in non-Latin languages.
In any case, I think this is acceptable for now since we can always submit
a new patch again later that puts a free/libre font first in addition to
the current stack being reverted. Either way we need to do more research
and testing to accomplish that, or even explore webfonts more.