On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@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,_F1... (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)
I've filed this at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63807 so we can talk in more detail outside the thread. I tested again in Chrome and Firefox on Linux.
Steven