On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would add as an issue, that there are major variance
in the font
selection based on platform and configuration. For some platforms, the
typo refresh chooses a font that is significantly lower quality than
the browser default (The opposite of "bad defaults" concern. I think
the browser choosing a bad default is much rarer then typo refresh
overriding the good browser default with something bad). So the
question becomes, to what extent are we willing to degrade some users
experience in order to make other user's experiance better. Which
immediately raises the question of what is the level of degradation,
and for how many people, compared to what is the level of user
experience improvement, and for what percentage is the experience
improved.
By "lower quality" I mean both subjectively, but also objectively. For
example, today I was reading
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Hamilton_wins_%27incredible%27_Bahrain_race,_F…
(enwikinews is one of the few wikis I haven't overridden the font
changes with css). At first I thought there was a typo in the image
caption toward the end of the page, an extra space between "prote" and
"stor". But no, the kerning on the font chosen is just literally that
bad, that you can't tell if it is an extra space, or just a kerning
error. I call that objectively bad (There's other things I don't like
about the font choice, but they are more touchy-feely subjective)
so
we can talk in more detail outside the thread. I tested again in Chrome and
Firefox on Linux.
Steven