Dear all,
My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail you will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts deployment.
On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator -- all wikis in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, (Eastern) Punjabi, Sankrit and Telugu have WebFonts now. WebFonts was not deployed on Malayalam and Tamil projects. The reason for this was that community members had requested us not to. We are confident that in time, the communities will request that WebFonts is enabled on their projects.
WebFonts aims to resolve the issue that users see incomplete web pages, because the fonts to properly render the page is not present in the local system by downloading the font through the browser.
One of our great challenges developing this functionality is the multitude of scripts and the low availability of freely licensed fonts that may be modified and redistributed.
Over the past few months we have tried to build out a collection of fonts in the extension mainly for Indic languages, and we have performed many tests. We have solicited community involvement through messaging in village pumps, e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts on personal blogs as well as on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, at developer events, through personal e-mails and through our bug tracker, and gotten some feedback, although unfortunately not for all the languages we would like to have gotten it for. We will of course continue our efforts in this area. Next to the community involvement, we have had a two day session with the Red Hat Localisation team in Pune, India.
Since the deployment, we have been criticised for not communicating enough -- or not through the right channels, not with the right people, not in time, or too soon, or not with the right messages. I'm not really sure how to respond to that, except for uttering a general "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa". We are working really hard in continuously improving the work that we do, and the way that we do it. We make mistakes, we are human after all, and when we become aware of our mistakes, we will do everything in our power to make it better.
With our team we support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation to "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." I care about that -- a lot. We all care, and I am pretty certain that we're not ignorant, dismissive or incapable. I acknowledge that we as the Localisation team are a relatively new entity within the MediaWiki development community and within the Wikimedia Foundation, with a very wide scope, and that we are dealing with a lot of technical details on which we are simply not able to assess the final quality; there are after all 7.500 languages in this world of over 7 billion people that we theoretically all cover, some 350 of those languages are supported in MediaWiki, and 280 within Wikimedia.
I accept that we cannot keep everybody happy -- doesn't keep us from trying, though. I want to try and work with as many people as possible in a constructive way. With these numbers, that's not always easy to coordinate. To channel the input on languages, we have set up "Language Support Teams"[2]. We do not yet have a language support team for every language. Please sign up if you care about the technical facilitation of your language in the Wikimedia movement. Let's use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list[3] to have constructive discussions about language support. Let's use the #mediawiki-i18n IRC channel[4] on Freenode to have real-time discussions. Let's use bugzilla.wikimedia.org to report bugs[5]. Link [5] explains the bug reporting procedure. If you already know how, report issues quickly using this link: http://ur1.ca/6ov9a .
Since the deployment, we have been made aware of about 17 issues. Some very serious in nature, others not requiring immediate attention. Yesterday an issue with web fonts not loading in Firefox was resolved in the infrastructure. Today around 15:30 UTC, we have deployed fixes for an additional hand full of issues[6]: functionality disabled in IE6, IE8 on Windows XP, selection buttons not working properly in IE7 and hiding the Samyak fonts in the font selector. During our current sprint, we are working on a framework for multi-lingual and localised user documentation as well as feature based feedback functionality for WebFonts, Narayam and Translate. In the future we will also explore what is known as "dark launch" by some, a kind of hidden live deployment of a feature, only usable be for example manipulating a URL. This would allow us to deploy a feature in a live environment, without having the "full deployment" impact.
Thanks for reading through this. I am looking forward to working with you! Please read on for details on all the issues that were reported on WebFonts recently.
Cheers! Siebrand Mazeland Product Manager Localisation Wikimedia Foundation
======================================= Links =======================================
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts [2] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n [4] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:WebChat [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106204
======================================= Open issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33004 -- Old cached pages do not have web fonts enabled Priority: HIGH -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wikimedia is able to serve this many pages with relative few servers because of very aggressive caching strategies, especially for anonymous users. WebFonts requires the addition of JavaScript for anonymous users, which is not being done for pages that are in the squid cache at the moment WebFonts was enabled. All squid cache objects for wikis on which WebFonts was deployed need to be purged. An internal RT ticket created for the Wikimedia Operations team to get anonymous squid caches purged. This may take up to a week or longer to be resolved.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018 -- Firefox 5 on Windows XP has script time-outs Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Localisation team has tested this report, and was not yet able to confirm the observation. The reason for using a non-recent version of Firefox for the report was the alleged lower memory usage. Brion noted that Mozilla has been actively working on lowering memory usage over the last year, so the reporter may be better off with the current versions than the old ones.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33110 -- Google Crome on Windows XP dispays gibberish Priority: LOW -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Observed very rarely on a page on Wikimedia Incubator, and we have not been able to reproduce this observation, let alone reproduce it reliably. A screenshot is present in the bug report. Except for reporting upstream, no action is being taken on this issue at this point in time.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33054 -- Hinting issues in Lohit fonts Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Confirmed in Windows XP. We can do something to the font by adding hinting, but this is a lot of work if it needs to be done manually. The stem of the Lohit glyphs could do with more width and darkness. This may not be desirable for platforms (Linux) which render it perfectly, because it already has hinting and anti-aliasing on an operating system level. Same goes got Windows 7.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 -- Page crashes on Webkit browsers with WebFonts enabled. Priority: MEDIUM (could be HIGH if we find many occurances) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A page in Nepali Wikipedia makes a tab on Mac OS X 10.7.2 with Google Crome crash. This behaviour was also reported for Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) with Safari 5.1.1 (7534.51.22, r102522) [This is a webkit nightly build] by thedj. This is most probably related to the WebFonts code, because if, as a logged in user, web fonts is disabled in preferences, the page does not crash Chrome. Developer Derk-Jan Hartman was asked to report this bug in the WebKit. Please make us aware of any additional pages that would cause this behaviour in any wiki.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102 -- OSX 10.7.2/Opera 11.60 has no fallback for Latin characters Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a bug that needs to be reported upstream. No technical measures have been taken so far to mitigate this issue. One of the Localisation team members has been in contact with a high level executive of Opera, and will contact that person again. We're going to wait for a few days for an outcome -- if there is no expectation of a relatively quick fix, we might disable WebFonts for Opera completely. Opera unfortunately does not have a public bug tracker.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027 -- Narayam and WebFonts both loading slows down page Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The reporter claims that the functionality is quicker on translatewiki.netthan it is in Wikimedia wikis. A commenter states that more functionality usually means more code, means more data that needs to be transferred, and without changing bandwidth, that causes longer load times. This currently isn't our highest priority, but eventually we will look into this a little deeper. We're inviting volunteers to do some of the data gathering and analysis for us. What is needed in our opinion is insight in the data volume added by WebFonts, as well as an assessment of the code quality with regards to size optimisation. All referenced properly, of course :). There are alternate EOT conversion tools that have a good compression ratio. Needs to be explored, but EOT is not required for modern browsers since they started using WOFF fonts which are compressed OpenType fonts.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33085 -- Integration of updated Lohit-Tamil Font Priority: MEDIUM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Request to update WebFonts with a font that is updated upstream. This is something the Localisation team checks regularly. Will probably be closed this week, pending issues the have a higher priority.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 -- Provide help page and bug report link for WebFonts Priority: HIGH -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More recently developed tools by the Wikimedia Foundation have often included feedback mechanisms. The Localisation team plans on implementing these for the functionality of the WebFonts, Narayam and Translate extension. Besides that, we also want to provide multi-lingual and localised documentation. This needs some thinking and some work to provide in a structured and navigable way. We'll keep you posted. It will most probably involve translatable *user* documentation on MediaWiki.org and hopefully it is possible to have one feedback location per feature across the multiple Wikimedia wikis -- this is something we're going to contact the ArticleFeedback and MoodBar teams for.
======================================= Closed issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025 -- When changing to a non-default web font, the content does not -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This issue was a side effect of a feature to allow multiple web fonts to be used using the "lang" attribute. It was resolved in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/105980 and has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33034 -- Web fonts not loading in Firefox -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Duplicate reports were 33038 and 33044. This issue originated from http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#same-origin-restriction. Almost all browsers except for Firefox ignore that specification. A fix was designed and deployed: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106092, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1501. Thanks to Roan, Brion and Ryan for their help.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775 -- Gibberish in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an unexplained phenomenon only observed in Internet Explorer on Windows XP. It is also hard to reproduce. One of the developers was able to make something somewhat reproducible on a clean, fully patched installation of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8. See bug report for details. Based on these observations we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33096 -- Internet Explorer 6 does not have font fallback -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IE6 not having font fallback causes Latin characters to display as squares when a web font is loaded that does not contain glyphs for the Latin script. A screenshot is available at http://media.crossbrowsertesting.com/users/34057/screenshots/window/z6690020.... Based on this observation, we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 6 and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024 -- WebFonts menu buttons not working in IE7 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This was caused by the JavaScript $( '<input type="radio" />' ) . attr( "name" ,"font"); not working in IE6 and IE7. Updating name attributes once they have been created is not possible. We think there may be more occurances of this in our code (one occurance in jQuery has already been identified: resources/jquery/jquery.validate.js:59). A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106175. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33040 -- Overlap in Samyak font for Hindi and Sanskrit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This issue occurs in Windows XP and Windows 7 (possibly also in Windows Vista) when using Google Chrome. It is not observed when using Chrome with Mac OS X 10.7.2 or several Linux distributions (Debian and Fedora). Samyak Devanagari is available as a non-default web font in Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Samyak Gujarati is available for Gujarati as a non-default font. This font needs to be corrected. The maintainers will be notified of the observed issues, and mean while, the fonts will be removed from the WebFonts selection list (but can still be used using the font-family property. A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106179. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33039 -- Overlap in Madan font for Nepali -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This report was invalid. The reporter was not aware of the correct glyph for the Nepali script. Comments on this bug report resulted in two odd observations (Crome crash, Opera font fallback), that have been split off into separate bug reports: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33095 -- WebFonts menu can expand off the screen -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If the translations for "Select font" and "Login / Register" are really short, like in http://mr.wiktionary.org, expanding the WebFonts menu for anonymous users will display a menu that is partially off the screen. It was resolved in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106186, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106197, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106201, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106202. These revisions also depend on a few small UI changes of both WebFonts and Narayam, and will be deployed on December 19, 2011.
<no bugzilla report> -- WebFonts menu expands under the control for customised input method in IE6 on transliteration -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are issues with the z index in IE6. Because of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172, WebFonts is no longer available in IE6, so this issue is obsolete. Observing that the Hindi projects Wikipedia and Wiktionary are using an custom input methods tool, we would like to invite them to test Narayam which contains many input methods in a MediaWiki extension. We are very open to having the Hindi input method InScript tested and add a transliteration input method with some community representatives, as we have done with other Indic languages. We hope this will eventually lead to Narayam being adopted by the Hindi community, and the custom input method being abandoned.
Siebrand - Thanks for the detailed report.
Again, let me reiterate that the I18n team has been working round the clock responding to feedback and fixing bugs. We all have been triaging outstanding bugs (critical and non-critical) and will continue to work through resolving these to continue improving the WebFonts functionality. We have also reported upstream on font issues that we cannot fix ourselves.
As referred to earlier, please: * Join the Language Support Teams to help us with technical requirements, testing and support of your favorite languages. * Use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list to report issues you're facing and discuss with us solutions that can be implemented. * Join us on the freenode irc channel #mediawiki-i18n for discussions * File bugs using bugzilla.wikimedia.org * Report issues at http://ur1.ca/6ov9a * Help us test!
Also, you're welcome to ping me or Siebrand with any questions you may have re: testing, support, development roadmap, more. I am available on irc at #wikimedia-dev, #mediawiki-i18n, and #mediawiki.
Thanks and look forward to your feedback. Alolita
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear all,
My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail you will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts deployment.
On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator -- all wikis in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, (Eastern) Punjabi, Sankrit and Telugu have WebFonts now. WebFonts was not deployed on Malayalam and Tamil projects. The reason for this was that community members had requested us not to. We are confident that in time, the communities will request that WebFonts is enabled on their projects.
WebFonts aims to resolve the issue that users see incomplete web pages, because the fonts to properly render the page is not present in the local system by downloading the font through the browser.
One of our great challenges developing this functionality is the multitude of scripts and the low availability of freely licensed fonts that may be modified and redistributed.
Over the past few months we have tried to build out a collection of fonts in the extension mainly for Indic languages, and we have performed many tests. We have solicited community involvement through messaging in village pumps, e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts on personal blogs as well as on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, at developer events, through personal e-mails and through our bug tracker, and gotten some feedback, although unfortunately not for all the languages we would like to have gotten it for. We will of course continue our efforts in this area. Next to the community involvement, we have had a two day session with the Red Hat Localisation team in Pune, India.
Since the deployment, we have been criticised for not communicating enough -- or not through the right channels, not with the right people, not in time, or too soon, or not with the right messages. I'm not really sure how to respond to that, except for uttering a general "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa". We are working really hard in continuously improving the work that we do, and the way that we do it. We make mistakes, we are human after all, and when we become aware of our mistakes, we will do everything in our power to make it better.
With our team we support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation to "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." I care about that -- a lot. We all care, and I am pretty certain that we're not ignorant, dismissive or incapable. I acknowledge that we as the Localisation team are a relatively new entity within the MediaWiki development community and within the Wikimedia Foundation, with a very wide scope, and that we are dealing with a lot of technical details on which we are simply not able to assess the final quality; there are after all 7.500 languages in this world of over 7 billion people that we theoretically all cover, some 350 of those languages are supported in MediaWiki, and 280 within Wikimedia.
I accept that we cannot keep everybody happy -- doesn't keep us from trying, though. I want to try and work with as many people as possible in a constructive way. With these numbers, that's not always easy to coordinate. To channel the input on languages, we have set up "Language Support Teams"[2]. We do not yet have a language support team for every language. Please sign up if you care about the technical facilitation of your language in the Wikimedia movement. Let's use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list[3] to have constructive discussions about language support. Let's use the #mediawiki-i18n IRC channel[4] on Freenode to have real-time discussions. Let's use bugzilla.wikimedia.org to report bugs[5]. Link [5] explains the bug reporting procedure. If you already know how, report issues quickly using this link: http://ur1.ca/6ov9a .
Since the deployment, we have been made aware of about 17 issues. Some very serious in nature, others not requiring immediate attention. Yesterday an issue with web fonts not loading in Firefox was resolved in the infrastructure. Today around 15:30 UTC, we have deployed fixes for an additional hand full of issues[6]: functionality disabled in IE6, IE8 on Windows XP, selection buttons not working properly in IE7 and hiding the Samyak fonts in the font selector. During our current sprint, we are working on a framework for multi-lingual and localised user documentation as well as feature based feedback functionality for WebFonts, Narayam and Translate. In the future we will also explore what is known as "dark launch" by some, a kind of hidden live deployment of a feature, only usable be for example manipulating a URL. This would allow us to deploy a feature in a live environment, without having the "full deployment" impact.
Thanks for reading through this. I am looking forward to working with you! Please read on for details on all the issues that were reported on WebFonts recently.
Cheers! Siebrand Mazeland Product Manager Localisation Wikimedia Foundation
======================================= Links =======================================
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts [2] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n [4] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:WebChat [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106204
======================================= Open issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33004 -- Old cached pages do not have web fonts enabled Priority: HIGH
Wikimedia is able to serve this many pages with relative few servers because of very aggressive caching strategies, especially for anonymous users. WebFonts requires the addition of JavaScript for anonymous users, which is not being done for pages that are in the squid cache at the moment WebFonts was enabled. All squid cache objects for wikis on which WebFonts was deployed need to be purged. An internal RT ticket created for the Wikimedia Operations team to get anonymous squid caches purged. This may take up to a week or longer to be resolved.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018 -- Firefox 5 on Windows XP has script time-outs Priority: MEDIUM
The Localisation team has tested this report, and was not yet able to confirm the observation. The reason for using a non-recent version of Firefox for the report was the alleged lower memory usage. Brion noted that Mozilla has been actively working on lowering memory usage over the last year, so the reporter may be better off with the current versions than the old ones.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33110 -- Google Crome on Windows XP dispays gibberish Priority: LOW
Observed very rarely on a page on Wikimedia Incubator, and we have not been able to reproduce this observation, let alone reproduce it reliably. A screenshot is present in the bug report. Except for reporting upstream, no action is being taken on this issue at this point in time.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33054 -- Hinting issues in Lohit fonts Priority: MEDIUM
Confirmed in Windows XP. We can do something to the font by adding hinting, but this is a lot of work if it needs to be done manually. The stem of the Lohit glyphs could do with more width and darkness. This may not be desirable for platforms (Linux) which render it perfectly, because it already has hinting and anti-aliasing on an operating system level. Same goes got Windows 7.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 -- Page crashes on Webkit browsers with WebFonts enabled. Priority: MEDIUM (could be HIGH if we find many occurances)
A page in Nepali Wikipedia makes a tab on Mac OS X 10.7.2 with Google Crome crash. This behaviour was also reported for Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) with Safari 5.1.1 (7534.51.22, r102522) [This is a webkit nightly build] by thedj. This is most probably related to the WebFonts code, because if, as a logged in user, web fonts is disabled in preferences, the page does not crash Chrome. Developer Derk-Jan Hartman was asked to report this bug in the WebKit. Please make us aware of any additional pages that would cause this behaviour in any wiki.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102 -- OSX 10.7.2/Opera 11.60 has no fallback for Latin characters Priority: MEDIUM
This is a bug that needs to be reported upstream. No technical measures have been taken so far to mitigate this issue. One of the Localisation team members has been in contact with a high level executive of Opera, and will contact that person again. We're going to wait for a few days for an outcome -- if there is no expectation of a relatively quick fix, we might disable WebFonts for Opera completely. Opera unfortunately does not have a public bug tracker.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027 -- Narayam and WebFonts both loading slows down page Priority: MEDIUM
The reporter claims that the functionality is quicker on translatewiki.netthan it is in Wikimedia wikis. A commenter states that more functionality usually means more code, means more data that needs to be transferred, and without changing bandwidth, that causes longer load times. This currently isn't our highest priority, but eventually we will look into this a little deeper. We're inviting volunteers to do some of the data gathering and analysis for us. What is needed in our opinion is insight in the data volume added by WebFonts, as well as an assessment of the code quality with regards to size optimisation. All referenced properly, of course :). There are alternate EOT conversion tools that have a good compression ratio. Needs to be explored, but EOT is not required for modern browsers since they started using WOFF fonts which are compressed OpenType fonts.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33085 -- Integration of updated Lohit-Tamil Font Priority: MEDIUM
Request to update WebFonts with a font that is updated upstream. This is something the Localisation team checks regularly. Will probably be closed this week, pending issues the have a higher priority.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 -- Provide help page and bug report link for WebFonts Priority: HIGH
More recently developed tools by the Wikimedia Foundation have often included feedback mechanisms. The Localisation team plans on implementing these for the functionality of the WebFonts, Narayam and Translate extension. Besides that, we also want to provide multi-lingual and localised documentation. This needs some thinking and some work to provide in a structured and navigable way. We'll keep you posted. It will most probably involve translatable *user* documentation on MediaWiki.org and hopefully it is possible to have one feedback location per feature across the multiple Wikimedia wikis -- this is something we're going to contact the ArticleFeedback and MoodBar teams for.
======================================= Closed issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025 -- When changing to a non-default web font, the content does not
This issue was a side effect of a feature to allow multiple web fonts to be used using the "lang" attribute. It was resolved in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/105980 and has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33034 -- Web fonts not loading in Firefox
Duplicate reports were 33038 and 33044. This issue originated from http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#same-origin-restriction. Almost all browsers except for Firefox ignore that specification. A fix was designed and deployed: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106092, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1501. Thanks to Roan, Brion and Ryan for their help.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775 -- Gibberish in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP
This is an unexplained phenomenon only observed in Internet Explorer on Windows XP. It is also hard to reproduce. One of the developers was able to make something somewhat reproducible on a clean, fully patched installation of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8. See bug report for details. Based on these observations we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33096 -- Internet Explorer 6 does not have font fallback
IE6 not having font fallback causes Latin characters to display as squares when a web font is loaded that does not contain glyphs for the Latin script. A screenshot is available at http://media.crossbrowsertesting.com/users/34057/screenshots/window/z6690020.... Based on this observation, we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 6 and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024 -- WebFonts menu buttons not working in IE7
This was caused by the JavaScript $( '<input type="radio" />' ) . attr( "name" ,"font"); not working in IE6 and IE7. Updating name attributes once they have been created is not possible. We think there may be more occurances of this in our code (one occurance in jQuery has already been identified: resources/jquery/jquery.validate.js:59). A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106175. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33040 -- Overlap in Samyak font for Hindi and Sanskrit
This issue occurs in Windows XP and Windows 7 (possibly also in Windows Vista) when using Google Chrome. It is not observed when using Chrome with Mac OS X 10.7.2 or several Linux distributions (Debian and Fedora). Samyak Devanagari is available as a non-default web font in Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Samyak Gujarati is available for Gujarati as a non-default font. This font needs to be corrected. The maintainers will be notified of the observed issues, and mean while, the fonts will be removed from the WebFonts selection list (but can still be used using the font-family property. A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106179. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33039 -- Overlap in Madan font for Nepali
This report was invalid. The reporter was not aware of the correct glyph for the Nepali script. Comments on this bug report resulted in two odd observations (Crome crash, Opera font fallback), that have been split off into separate bug reports: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33095 -- WebFonts menu can expand off the screen
If the translations for "Select font" and "Login / Register" are really short, like in http://mr.wiktionary.org, expanding the WebFonts menu for anonymous users will display a menu that is partially off the screen. It was resolved in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106186, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106197, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106201, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106202. These revisions also depend on a few small UI changes of both WebFonts and Narayam, and will be deployed on December 19, 2011.
<no bugzilla report> -- WebFonts menu expands under the control for customised input method in IE6 on transliteration
There are issues with the z index in IE6. Because of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172, WebFonts is no longer available in IE6, so this issue is obsolete. Observing that the Hindi projects Wikipedia and Wiktionary are using an custom input methods tool, we would like to invite them to test Narayam which contains many input methods in a MediaWiki extension. We are very open to having the Hindi input method InScript tested and add a transliteration input method with some community representatives, as we have done with other Indic languages. We hope this will eventually lead to Narayam being adopted by the Hindi community, and the custom input method being abandoned.
Hi, As I can see the fonts are not rendered properly. I have faced this issue earlier but the email from Abhishek Singh describes the problem a bit more in detail.
(Please correct me if I am in a wrong mailing list, Thanks )
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Abhishek Singh aks.abhishek@gmail.comwrote:
Hi All, I'm using Firefox 11 on a x86_64 linux machine, and there are problems while rendering devnagari characters. On the same browser, other webpages with devnagari characters render well (e.g. http://nagariknews.com).
When I looked at the css styling, I found that the default text is set to "Lohit Nepali" font. When I changed it to "Lohit Devnagari", it worked (also because the Lohit Devnagari font is installed on my system). The same page works fine on Google Chrome. On further debugging, I found that the woff version of the Lohit Nepali font is somehow aborted while loading the page ([Ctrl]+[F5] refresh this time). Same is the case with the IranianSans woff file. The locations are
http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions-1.19/WebFonts/fonts/Deva/Lohit-Nepali... and
http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions-1.19/WebFonts/fonts/Arab/IranianSans.... (Keeps on loading, but could not load after a while and there is a timeout). Surprisingly though, when you try these URLs in your browser you would be able to download both the files.
The screenshot of the problem with page rendering can be viewed at http://imagebin.org/204475 and the problem with loading the woff files as viewed in the "Net" panel of the firebug extension can be viewed at http://imagebin.org/204476
Seems some sort of weird problem with my browser. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
-- Abhishek Singh FOSS Nepal Community http://wiki.fossnepal.org
On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 12:06 AM, Alolita Sharma asharma@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Siebrand - Thanks for the detailed report.
Again, let me reiterate that the I18n team has been working round the clock responding to feedback and fixing bugs. We all have been triaging outstanding bugs (critical and non-critical) and will continue to work through resolving these to continue improving the WebFonts functionality. We have also reported upstream on font issues that we cannot fix ourselves.
As referred to earlier, please:
- Join the Language Support Teams to help us with technical requirements,
testing and support of your favorite languages.
- Use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list to report issues you're facing and
discuss with us solutions that can be implemented.
- Join us on the freenode irc channel #mediawiki-i18n for discussions
- File bugs using bugzilla.wikimedia.org
- Report issues at http://ur1.ca/6ov9a
- Help us test!
Also, you're welcome to ping me or Siebrand with any questions you may have re: testing, support, development roadmap, more. I am available on irc at #wikimedia-dev, #mediawiki-i18n, and #mediawiki.
Thanks and look forward to your feedback. Alolita
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear all,
My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail
you
will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts
deployment.
On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator -- all wikis in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, (Eastern) Punjabi, Sankrit and Telugu have WebFonts now. WebFonts was not deployed on Malayalam and Tamil projects. The reason for this was that community members had requested us not to. We are confident that in time, the communities will request that WebFonts is enabled on their projects.
WebFonts aims to resolve the issue that users see incomplete web pages, because the fonts to properly render the page is not present in the local system by downloading the font through the browser.
One of our great challenges developing this functionality is the
multitude
of scripts and the low availability of freely licensed fonts that may be modified and redistributed.
Over the past few months we have tried to build out a collection of fonts in the extension mainly for Indic languages, and we have performed many tests. We have solicited community involvement through messaging in
village
pumps, e-mails on mailing lists, blog posts on personal blogs as well as
on
the Wikimedia Foundation blog, at developer events, through personal e-mails and through our bug tracker, and gotten some feedback, although unfortunately not for all the languages we would like to have gotten it for. We will of course continue our efforts in this area. Next to the community involvement, we have had a two day session with the Red Hat Localisation team in Pune, India.
Since the deployment, we have been criticised for not communicating
enough
-- or not through the right channels, not with the right people, not in time, or too soon, or not with the right messages. I'm not really sure
how
to respond to that, except for uttering a general "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa". We are working really hard in continuously improving the work
that
we do, and the way that we do it. We make mistakes, we are human after
all,
and when we become aware of our mistakes, we will do everything in our power to make it better.
With our team we support the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation to "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the
sum of all knowledge." I care about that -- a lot. We all care, and I am pretty certain that we're not ignorant, dismissive or incapable. I acknowledge that we as the Localisation team are a relatively new entity within the MediaWiki development community and within the Wikimedia Foundation, with a very wide scope, and that we are dealing with a lot of technical details on which we are simply not able to assess the final quality; there are after all 7.500 languages in this world of over 7 billion people that we theoretically all cover, some 350 of those
languages
are supported in MediaWiki, and 280 within Wikimedia.
I accept that we cannot keep everybody happy -- doesn't keep us from trying, though. I want to try and work with as many people as possible
in a
constructive way. With these numbers, that's not always easy to
coordinate.
To channel the input on languages, we have set up "Language Support Teams"[2]. We do not yet have a language support team for every language. Please sign up if you care about the technical facilitation of your language in the Wikimedia movement. Let's use the mediawiki-i18n mailing list[3] to have constructive discussions about language support. Let's
use
the #mediawiki-i18n IRC channel[4] on Freenode to have real-time discussions. Let's use bugzilla.wikimedia.org to report bugs[5]. Link
[5]
explains the bug reporting procedure. If you already know how, report issues quickly using this link: http://ur1.ca/6ov9a .
Since the deployment, we have been made aware of about 17 issues. Some very serious in nature, others not requiring immediate attention.
Yesterday
an issue with web fonts not loading in Firefox was resolved in the infrastructure. Today around 15:30 UTC, we have deployed fixes for an additional hand full of issues[6]: functionality disabled in IE6, IE8 on Windows XP, selection buttons not working properly in IE7 and hiding the Samyak fonts in the font selector. During our current sprint, we are working on a framework for multi-lingual and localised user documentation as well as feature based feedback functionality for WebFonts, Narayam and Translate. In the future we will also explore what is known as "dark launch" by some, a kind of hidden live deployment of a feature, only
usable
be for example manipulating a URL. This would allow us to deploy a
feature
in a live environment, without having the "full deployment" impact.
Thanks for reading through this. I am looking forward to working with
you!
Please read on for details on all the issues that were reported on
WebFonts
recently.
Cheers! Siebrand Mazeland Product Manager Localisation Wikimedia Foundation
======================================= Links =======================================
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts [2] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Language_support_team [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n [4] https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:WebChat [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106204
======================================= Open issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33004 -- Old cached pages do not have web fonts enabled Priority: HIGH
Wikimedia is able to serve this many pages with relative few servers because of very aggressive caching strategies, especially for anonymous users. WebFonts requires the addition of JavaScript for anonymous users, which is not being done for pages that are in the squid cache at the
moment
WebFonts was enabled. All squid cache objects for wikis on which WebFonts was deployed need to be purged. An internal RT ticket created for the Wikimedia Operations team to get anonymous squid caches purged. This may take up to a week or longer to be resolved.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018 -- Firefox 5 on Windows XP has script time-outs Priority: MEDIUM
The Localisation team has tested this report, and was not yet able to confirm the observation. The reason for using a non-recent version of Firefox for the report was the alleged lower memory usage. Brion noted
that
Mozilla has been actively working on lowering memory usage over the last year, so the reporter may be better off with the current versions than
the
old ones.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33110 -- Google Crome on Windows XP dispays gibberish Priority: LOW
Observed very rarely on a page on Wikimedia Incubator, and we have not been able to reproduce this observation, let alone reproduce it
reliably. A
screenshot is present in the bug report. Except for reporting upstream,
no
action is being taken on this issue at this point in time.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33054 -- Hinting issues in Lohit fonts Priority: MEDIUM
Confirmed in Windows XP. We can do something to the font by adding hinting, but this is a lot of work if it needs to be done manually. The stem of the Lohit glyphs could do with more width and darkness. This may not be desirable for platforms (Linux) which render it perfectly, because it already has hinting and anti-aliasing on an operating system level.
Same
goes got Windows 7.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 -- Page crashes on Webkit browsers with WebFonts enabled. Priority: MEDIUM (could be HIGH if we find many occurances)
A page in Nepali Wikipedia makes a tab on Mac OS X 10.7.2 with Google Crome crash. This behaviour was also reported for Mac OS X 10.7.2 (11C74) with Safari 5.1.1 (7534.51.22, r102522) [This is a webkit nightly build] by thedj. This is most probably related to the WebFonts code, because if, as a logged in user, web fonts is disabled in preferences, the page does not crash Chrome. Developer Derk-Jan Hartman was asked to report this bug in the WebKit. Please make us aware of any additional pages that would cause this behaviour in any wiki.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102 -- OSX 10.7.2/Opera 11.60 has no fallback for Latin characters Priority: MEDIUM
This is a bug that needs to be reported upstream. No technical measures have been taken so far to mitigate this issue. One of the Localisation
team
members has been in contact with a high level executive of Opera, and
will
contact that person again. We're going to wait for a few days for an outcome -- if there is no expectation of a relatively quick fix, we might disable WebFonts for Opera completely. Opera unfortunately does not have
a
public bug tracker.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027 -- Narayam and WebFonts both
loading
slows down page Priority: MEDIUM
The reporter claims that the functionality is quicker on
translatewiki.netthan it is in Wikimedia wikis. A commenter states that more functionality
usually means more code, means more data that needs to be transferred,
and
without changing bandwidth, that causes longer load times. This currently isn't our highest priority, but eventually we will look into this a little deeper. We're inviting volunteers to do some of the
data
gathering and analysis for us. What is needed in our opinion is insight
in
the data volume added by WebFonts, as well as an assessment of the code quality with regards to size optimisation. All referenced properly, of course :). There are alternate EOT conversion tools that have a good compression ratio. Needs to be explored, but EOT is not required for
modern
browsers since they started using WOFF fonts which are compressed
OpenType
fonts.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33085 -- Integration of updated Lohit-Tamil Font Priority: MEDIUM
Request to update WebFonts with a font that is updated upstream. This is something the Localisation team checks regularly. Will probably be closed this week, pending issues the have a higher priority.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 -- Provide help page and bug report link for WebFonts Priority: HIGH
More recently developed tools by the Wikimedia Foundation have often included feedback mechanisms. The Localisation team plans on implementing these for the functionality of the WebFonts, Narayam and Translate extension. Besides that, we also want to provide multi-lingual and localised documentation. This needs some thinking and some work to
provide
in a structured and navigable way. We'll keep you posted. It will most probably involve translatable *user* documentation on MediaWiki.org and hopefully it is possible to have one feedback location per feature across the multiple Wikimedia wikis -- this is something we're going to contact the ArticleFeedback and MoodBar teams for.
======================================= Closed issues =======================================
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025 -- When changing to a non-default web font, the content does not
This issue was a side effect of a feature to allow multiple web fonts to be used using the "lang" attribute. It was resolved in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/105980 and has
been
deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33034 -- Web fonts not loading in Firefox
Duplicate reports were 33038 and 33044. This issue originated from http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#same-origin-restriction. Almost all browsers except for Firefox ignore that specification. A fix was designed and deployed:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106092,
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1501. Thanks to Roan, Brion and Ryan for their help.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775 -- Gibberish in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP
This is an unexplained phenomenon only observed in Internet Explorer on Windows XP. It is also hard to reproduce. One of the developers was able
to
make something somewhat reproducible on a clean, fully patched
installation
of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 8. See bug report for details. Based on these observations we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33096 -- Internet Explorer 6 does not
have
font fallback
IE6 not having font fallback causes Latin characters to display as
squares
when a web font is loaded that does not contain glyphs for the Latin script. A screenshot is available at
http://media.crossbrowsertesting.com/users/34057/screenshots/window/z6690020... .
Based on this observation, we think it is a bad idea to keep supporting WebFonts in Internet Explorer 6 and we have disabled it in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024 -- WebFonts menu buttons not
working
in IE7
This was caused by the JavaScript $( '<input type="radio" />' ) . attr( "name" ,"font"); not working in IE6 and IE7. Updating name attributes
once
they have been created is not possible. We think there may be more occurances of this in our code (one occurance in jQuery has already been identified: resources/jquery/jquery.validate.js:59). A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106175. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33040 -- Overlap in Samyak font for Hindi and Sanskrit
This issue occurs in Windows XP and Windows 7 (possibly also in Windows Vista) when using Google Chrome. It is not observed when using Chrome
with
Mac OS X 10.7.2 or several Linux distributions (Debian and Fedora).
Samyak
Devanagari is available as a non-default web font in Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Samyak Gujarati is available for Gujarati as a non-default
font.
This font needs to be corrected. The maintainers will be notified of the observed issues, and mean while, the fonts will be removed from the WebFonts selection list (but can still be used using the font-family property. A fix was made in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106179. This fix has been deployed.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33039 -- Overlap in Madan font for Nepali
This report was invalid. The reporter was not aware of the correct glyph for the Nepali script. Comments on this bug report resulted in two odd observations (Crome
crash,
Opera font fallback), that have been split off into separate bug reports: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33100 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33102.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33095 -- WebFonts menu can expand off
the
screen
If the translations for "Select font" and "Login / Register" are really short, like in http://mr.wiktionary.org, expanding the WebFonts menu for anonymous users will display a menu that is partially off the screen. It was resolved in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106186, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106197, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106201, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106202. These revisions also depend on a few small UI changes of both WebFonts and Narayam, and will be deployed on December 19, 2011.
<no bugzilla report> -- WebFonts menu expands under the control for customised input method in IE6 on transliteration
There are issues with the z index in IE6. Because of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/106172, WebFonts
is
no longer available in IE6, so this issue is obsolete. Observing that the Hindi projects Wikipedia and Wiktionary are using an custom input methods tool, we would like to invite them to test Narayam which contains many input methods in a MediaWiki extension. We are very open to having the Hindi input method InScript tested and add a transliteration input method with some community representatives, as we have done with other Indic languages. We hope this will eventually lead to Narayam being adopted by the Hindi community, and the custom input method being abandoned.
-- Alolita Sharma Director, Features Engineering Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Dear all,
First up, some kudos for i18n team for taking up this project to help Indic communities. I also guess this is probably one of the largest webfonts deployment till date. We also appreciate the team working overtime last couple of days for making a quick progress to solve the open issues. We look forward to better webfonts soon and am eager to get a quality version of it deployed on Tamil Wikiprojects sooner.
Having said that, we(critics mentioned in above mail) were indeed unhappy with the enmasse roll out without sufficient testing to a large user base. I agree that some issues like same origin restriction bug may miss any amount of testing if its not done on wmf cluster, but certain others could have been found with more community involvement. I like the concept of "dark launch" and wish they come sooner and take priority for any and all future deployments. This will solve the major concern of affecting user experience of millions of readers while we try to make the software better. I also look forward to the feedback mechanism update too!
Language support teams :- I know that there was very little support from the community, (not many,baring us the critics who gave feedback). I have been hearing the word "Language support teams" for few months now. If people are not interested to join them, they must be forced to join them(by way of not supporting them/ deploying any component for the language) so as to provide better support. If getting contacts is the issue, Shiju should be able to link people. Deploying things on live which are not certified by language users is a dangerous thing.
A lot of us are willing to help to get better support for our language and we hope there shall be more communication. On my part, I will try spending few hours on #mediawiki-i18n , please feel free to bug me to test anything.
Regards, Srikanth L
PS: I understand the criticism might have come hard on the India list, but we(critics) are getting used to a pattern beyond Webfonts. We alert of something dangerous on the cards, People(mostly WMF) tend to ignore us, Then they "firefight" and then we criticize more post the entire thing, "you would have been better had you to listened us". This has happened 3rd time on row now, other 2 being Protest against Jimbo at WikiConference India & IEP. I hope sooner, people take us seriously.
On 14/12/11 22:33, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
Language support teams :- I know that there was very little support from the community, (not many,baring us the critics who gave feedback). I have been hearing the word "Language support teams" for few months now. If people are not interested to join them, they must be forced to join them(by way of not supporting them/ deploying any component for the language) so as to provide better support.
In order to force them, "if you don't test this it may break horribly for you when deployed" seems way more convincing than "no new goodies for you".
Development must continue even if ignored (do not confuse with negative feedback), but blind coding without feedback is a dangerous zone.
PS: I understand the criticism might have come hard on the India list, but we(critics) are getting used to a pattern beyond Webfonts. We alert of something dangerous on the cards, People(mostly WMF) tend to ignore us, Then they "firefight" and then we criticize more post the entire thing, "you would have been better had you to listened us". This has happened 3rd time on row now, other 2 being Protest against Jimbo at WikiConference India & IEP. I hope sooner, people take us seriously.
It's not that Indian sites are treated worse, see the recent (similar) issues in commons with EXIF.
On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 03:38, Platonides platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/12/11 22:33, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
Language support teams :-
In order to force them, "if you don't test this it may break horribly for you when deployed" seems way more convincing than "no new goodies for you".
We tried telling people to test saying the same thing, may be should try telling them more often.
Development must continue even if ignored (do not confuse with negative feedback), but blind coding without feedback is a dangerous zone.
+1
PS: I understand the criticism might have come hard on the India list, but we(critics) are getting used to a pattern beyond Webfonts. We alert of something dangerous on the cards, People(mostly WMF) tend to ignore us, Then they "firefight" and then we criticize more post the entire thing, "you would have been better had you to listened us". This has happened 3rd time on row now, other 2 being Protest against Jimbo at WikiConference India & IEP. I hope sooner, people take us seriously.
It's not that Indian sites are treated worse, see the recent (similar) issues in commons with EXIF.
Sorry I didn't quite get you, not sure if you got what i meant as well. I never said / meant / implied "Indian sites are treated worse", what I tried to convey was why the criticism on India list is high.
Hi ,
The WebFonts is a great initiative for the indic wikipedia readers. I have tested this extension for the Bengali wikipedia. I have checked form some of the browsers (Firefox 7 & 8 from windows 7 and XP, Chrome 15.0 -windows 7 and XP, Firefox 7 form Uubntu 11.10) in different machines and in every case i had to face the same problem, that the page loads twice and takes an extra time for each of the pages.
At the very first time the page loads with the system default font and then the whole page became empty and after that the browser shows the content with the selected web font.
and the WebFonts did not work with the Android (2.3.6) default browser and in the Opera Mobile browser for android.
thanks Nasir Khan Saikat Wikimedia Bangladesh
On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:59 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan srik.lak@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 03:38, Platonides platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/12/11 22:33, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
Language support teams :-
In order to force them, "if you don't test this it may break horribly for you when deployed" seems way more convincing than "no new goodies for you".
We tried telling people to test saying the same thing, may be should try telling them more often.
Development must continue even if ignored (do not confuse with negative feedback), but blind coding without feedback is a dangerous zone.
+1
PS: I understand the criticism might have come hard on the India list, but we(critics) are getting used to a pattern beyond Webfonts. We alert of something dangerous on the cards, People(mostly WMF) tend to ignore us, Then they "firefight" and then we criticize more post the entire thing, "you would have been better had you to listened us". This has happened 3rd time on row now, other 2 being Protest against Jimbo at WikiConference India & IEP. I hope sooner, people take us seriously.
It's not that Indian sites are treated worse, see the recent (similar) issues in commons with EXIF.
Sorry I didn't quite get you, not sure if you got what i meant as well. I never said / meant / implied "Indian sites are treated worse", what I tried to convey was why the criticism on India list is high.
-- Regards Srikanth.L _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hi Nasir,
Thanks for the feedback! Please report these issues in http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org so we can track them. See inline comments for details.
I also cleaned up the cc list.
Op 15 dec. 2011 om 19:33 heeft Nasir Khan nasir8891@gmail.com het volgende geschreven:
The WebFonts is a great initiative for the indic wikipedia readers. I have tested this extension for the Bengali wikipedia. I have checked form some of the browsers (Firefox 7 & 8 from windows 7 and XP, Chrome 15.0 -windows 7 and XP, Firefox 7 form Uubntu 11.10) in different machines and in every case i had to face the same problem, that the page loads twice and takes an extra time for each of the pages.
This observation is called FOUT, short for flash of unformatted text. It should be as short as possible, but it is usually there for a tenth of a second. Read more about it on http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/
At the very first time the page loads with the system default font and then the whole page became empty and after that the browser shows the content with the selected web font.
and the WebFonts did not work with the Android (2.3.6) default browser and in the Opera Mobile browser for android.
This is valuable information. Please create two issue reports and if you can, please also report those issues with the android and opera mobile projects so they can get addressed upstream. -- Siebrand Mazeland
M: +31 6 50 69 1239 Skype: siebrand
Hi!
It would be awesome if we could support some historical writing systems with web fonts, for example runes. There is a great free (GPL) font for this: junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). It is possible to use it in the future? * * Farewell, *Glanthor (Ákos Szabó)*
Glanthor glanthor@gmail.com writes:
It would be awesome if we could support some historical writing systems with web fonts, for example runes. There is a great free (GPL) font for this: junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). It is possible to use it in the future?
Sounds like an interesting idea that might broaden the appeal.
I especially like the idea of including some Tolkien[1][2] or Klingon[3] scripts. Now, if only we had some good free fonts...
Mark.
[1] http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/tengwar.html
Also sprach Glanthor:
It would be awesome if we could support some historical writing systems with web fonts, for example runes. There is a great free (GPL) font for this: junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). It is possible to use it in the future?
It's certainly technically possible. Here's a small demo page:
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2012/runic/
At first glance, it seems like the use of SVG to depict runes on pages like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic
can be replaced by using Junicode as a webfont.
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Hoi, I blogged about Junaid and using it for the Runic script. [1] Please comment.. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2012/05/font-subsets-ii.html
On 2 January 2012 06:55, Glanthor glanthor@gmail.com wrote:
Hi!
It would be awesome if we could support some historical writing systems with web fonts, for example runes. There is a great free (GPL) font for this: junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). It is possible to use it in the future?
Farewell, *Glanthor (Ákos Szabó)* _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I think it's enough to use the runic part of the font. * * Farewell, *Glanthor (= Ákos Szabó :)*
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, I blogged about Junaid and using it for the Runic script. [1] Please comment.. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2012/05/font-subsets-ii.html
On 2 January 2012 06:55, Glanthor glanthor@gmail.com wrote:
Hi!
It would be awesome if we could support some historical writing systems with web fonts, for example runes. There is a great free (GPL) font for this: junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). It is possible to use it in the future?
Farewell, *Glanthor (Ákos Szabó)* _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Also sprach Siebrand Mazeland (WMF):
My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail you will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts deployment.
On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator
This is great news, concratulations. When the webfonts battle started
http://news.cnet.com/Microsofts-forgotten-monopoly/2010-1032_3-6085417.html
some people doubted that "non-Western scripts can easily be added", as the article claimed. Perhaps "easily" isn't the best word, but your work has shown that it's possible, and -- as a result -- the world is a better place.
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
2012/1/3 Håkon Wium Lie howcome@opera.com:
Also sprach Siebrand Mazeland (WMF):
> My apologies up front for the long e-mail that follows. In this e-mail you > will find a comprehensive status overview of the recent WebFonts deployment. > > On Monday December 12 at 18:00 UTC we deployed the extension WebFonts[1] to > 40 wikis in 11 Indic languages and Wikimedia Incubator
This is great news, concratulations. When the webfonts battle started
http://news.cnet.com/Microsofts-forgotten-monopoly/2010-1032_3-6085417.html
some people doubted that "non-Western scripts can easily be added", as the article claimed. Perhaps "easily" isn't the best word, but your work has shown that it's possible, and -- as a result -- the world is a better place.
Thank you very much for this comment, Håkon.
Since you're here, this related Opera bug may interest you:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33102
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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