On Apr 8, 2014 3:46 AM, "Steven Walling" <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 5:40 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> I've read through this thread and I've formulated two questions:
>
> * Is there consensus to specify "font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',
Helvetica,
Arial,
sans-serif;" in MediaWiki core?
I am going to be annoying and answer your question with a question:
consensus among who? How do make a decision like this?
On the one hand, you have Wikimedia users, who don't really care about the
appearance of promoting FOSS or not. They just want to things to work and
look good. They also believe that the only consensus that matters is the
one on their local wiki. They could honestly care less what the
conglomeration of volunteer and staff developers think their internal
consensus is. And mostly, even when something is a consensus decision
based
on an RFC/discussion, the Wikimedia Foundation gets
the blame (as we
should).
Is the above the group amongst who you think there is consensus to go with
font stack "font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial,
sans-serif;" ?
It seems a rather nebulous group. Are you sure there is consensus amongst
them, or could it reflect wishful thinking of what you're pretty sure they
must agree with.
Also, I doubt that this entire group doesn't care about specifying non free
fonts. If you hand-wave the group that does away, that leads to circular
reasoning that the group that doesn't care about specifying non free fonts
really doesn't care if non free fonts are specified. That doesnt tell us
much.
I'm starting to doubt there is any group of people that you're not willing
to dismiss the opinion of because the have the wrong opinion and we
shouldn't listen to them on the issue of non free fonts.
On the other hand, we have MediaWiki developers, some of whom would rather
throw up their hands and not specify a real font stack, rather than touch
the non-free fonts *most users already have* with a ten foot pole. They
seem to think that an RFC or discussion on Wikitech-l is what represents a
consensus that must be respected. And they don't feel responsible for what
gets released on Wikimedia sites necessarily.
We can gain more consistent, accessible typography across languages with
an
iterative approach that continues to build on what
we've done over the
last
five months. Or we can go back to the drawing board to
try and please
everyone, which is an impossibility if you ever want to make progress.
* Is there an issue with specifying
"font-family: sans-serif;" in
MediaWiki core?
Do you mean just for body type as Odder proposed in
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124475/, or for everything?
Steven
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