On 03/10/2014 10:19 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
Again... promoting to whom? Who will look at our CSS
To ourselves, to start with. This is a discussion that matters to Wikimedia in the first place.
And then there is no lack of people paying attention to font choices. There hasn't been lack of articles about Wikipedia or about Helvetica Neue in the media. The day journalists using their beloved Apple devices see that their beloved Wikipedia looks different, at least one of them will write about it. Then a lover of free fonts and Wikipedia (there is no lack of them either) will reply somewhere in some form, and this debate will start again.
How will this impair our ability to attract and retain readers and editors of Wikimedia
projects, or
developers of MediaWiki? How does it create a dependency that hobbles
us in
the long run?
Let me ask these questions to the challengers of the status quo:
Are we getting any reports of readability problems from users currently reading our content in Helvetica? Are we losing readers, editors, or credibility because our texts render as Helvetica in some devices? What specific problems are we solving by changing the current "sans-serif" for a stack including proprietary typefaces?
On 03/10/2014 09:22 AM, Jon Robson wrote:
we have to think about the world we live in and that we want our content to be as readable as possible
Readability of Helvetica texts doesn't seem to be a relevant problem in this world, considering the fact that it is the most used sans-serif. Still today Apple decides that "sans-serif" means "Helvetica" in their products. They can always define Helvetica Neue as their default, they seem so invested in it anyway. I don't see why Wikimedia needs to make that choice for them.
Restricting ourselves to only free fonts seems like cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Like restricting Commons to free content only, missing the advantages and comfort of non-commercial and fair use. Since the beginning, Wikimedia chose freedom before convenience, and this is one of the reasons why this project is unique and successful today.
The bottom line of this discussion is that promoters of proprietary typefaces keep thinking that specifying them in our CSS is a convenience, despite the fact that others are insisting that this is an important exception in Wikimedia's free software alignment, a step that requires a strong justification (like for instance the MP3 exception).
Is the Helvetica vs Helvetica Neue choice a problem so important that requires us to make such exception? Because this is the only difference that the introduction of proprietary typefaces in our CSS seems to bring.
Please consider dropping Helvetica Neue from the proposed CSS specification. Please forget about specifying proprietary typefaces in Wikimedia/MediaWiki's CSS. (Arial and Helvetica can be safely removed, they are rendered in Windows and Mac/iOS anyway by simply defining "sans-serif"). If you want to specify free fonts, fine. If you prefer not to specify free fonts either, fine as well.
As said, none of this represents any criticism to the rest of proposals you are pushing with the very welcomed Typography update. And we are just as frustrated with this discussion as you, as busy with our own work as you.