On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Erwin Dokter erwin@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_th...
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.
Again, this excercise is completely Latin-centered. Projects using different script have no choice but to override to their native fonts, and only Europe/Americas is left to 'enjoy' the new font stack.
To add on to what Jon said: we're going to figure this out in discussion with the communities. I don't think it's the case at all that users "have no choice" if they want readable text in a non-Latin script. To use CJK as an example: I actually was able to remove some local hacks that were necessary before the new version. We'll keep working on it.