Issara,
*"Never were sufficient? Prove it. What's the evidence?" *
Prove the status quo is good enough for everyone, prove that it is ideal,
prove that it is enjoyable, that it is beautiful, desirable. I think you'll
find this is impossible. Design is subjective in many ways, as I'm sure you
well know, we work off of our experience, off of best practices, off
copying and stealing where appropriate. You could say the burden of proof
is on the agent of change, or you could be open to change, and not demand
proof, but rather seek to see how it affects users in the end, it is a
rather small change, and everyone is devoting quite a lot of energy to it,
for better or worse.
Honestly I don't know if you will be swayed one way or another from your
current decision, but I do know that we can't please everyone, we aren't
now, and we never will, we can continue to educate, discuss, and try to
reach consensus, which is what we will always strive for.
*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>
On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/03/14 14:51, Max wrote:
Hey Isarra, that's some good questions.
I'll try to answer as concise as possible, but in case you're interested,
here's the detailed version:
https://gist.github.com/awesomephant/9352699
*> Why would this be the best experience?*
In our case, a good experience means being able to *read stuff* and
understand the content as easy as possible. Therefore, a typographic setup
that makes reading as easy as possible makes for a good experience.
But why would *this* be the best for that? How do we know it's easier?
*> But why would we, for an interface for an online encyclopedia and
similar, need something so specific at all?*
Our goal is to help people get information they need by *reading articles*.
It makes sense to make reading an article as easy as possible, because
ultimately that will help people understand the content. The typeface is an
important part of good typography and should be chosen carefully, even
though there's other factors such as spacing and size that need to be
considered.
When operating systems determine their font renderers, do they completely
neglect to consider any of this? Are the system interfaces and other
applications illegible because they chose bad fonts and didn't consider
spacing and size? Because that would be somewhat surprising unless it's a
bunch of non-toolkit apps in twm or something. Otherwise, though, things
are probably fine.
And I'd put forward that one of the biggest factors in what people find
easy to read is *what they're used to** reading*. Consider how people
usually complain the most when something changes, regardless of how it
changes. Consider how I love DejaVu Sans' width and miss it when I'm on
windows, despite how the narrower windows default Arial renders just fine
there (it doesn't render well at all in smaller sizes on a lot of linux),
whereas a mac user I know who was used to Helvetica/Arial thought DejaVu
Sans' width was ridiculous and wondered how I could even tolerate it.
Consider handwriting - you would probably have some difficulty reading my
handwriting, and yet I have no trouble at all with it so long as all of the
letters are there. Consider cursive vs print - people who aren't used to
reading/writing in cursive often have trouble reading that as well, to the
point where some simply can't.
On computers and other devices, what people are usually most used to
reading is what the *system* uses. Because that means most of the things
*on* the system will also be using it.
*> If there is a very specific 'right font', why aren't we using it as a
webfont?*
I think webfonts are amazing, and we should definitely use them. However,
even with webfonts using a font stack is a good idea. What if the user has
an old browser that doesn't support webfonts? What if the user chose not to
download font files to save bandwidth? In those cases we still want to do
our best to ensure a decent reading experience, which isn't always possible
with the default fallbacks.
Our font stack would look something like this:
'Fancy pants Webfont Pro', DejaVu Sans, Arial, sans-serif;
Webfonts may be amazing, but that does not necessarily mean they are a
good idea to use in most cases. Game-related sites and anything else
maintaining the look and feel of a certain theme/genre are good use cases,
as well as when you need character support and don't expect your users to
necessarily have anything installed for it (ULS does this), but without a
specific need for them, I would argue webfonts are best avoided entirely.
The problems they pose are huge:
- The cross-platform rendering issues that are normally encountered
with locally installed fonts can become much more severe (this appears in
particular in windows and especially chrome where the weight handling can
render a webfont completely illegible)
- Download sizes are an issue
- When you need to handle support for multiple character sets it
quickly becomes problematic (and on top of that, an improperly set up
webfont can even kill a system's normal fallback handling for unsupported
character sets)
That last bit could probably be mitigated/resolved by RL by only serving
up relevant character sets for the page in question, but such is
unfortunately a decent way off from being implemented.
The others, too, can be overcome or deemed acceptable if there's a real
need, but is there here?
*> Why did the generic 'serif' and 'sans-serif' become insufficient?*
They were in fact never sufficient. But for quite some time, web
technology didn't allow us to do it better. Now that it does (with webfonts
and finer typographic control), why shouldn't we go ahead and improve our
user experience?
Never were sufficient? Prove it. What's the evidence?
Hope that answered your questions, feel free to hit me up if something
isn't clear.
Best, max.
@awesomephant
All that said, I do appreciate the response.
-I
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