On 14/04/14 23:49, Erwin Dokter wrote:
On 15-04-2014 00:55, Isarra Yos wrote:
Deemed better? Better how? But that's what I'm saying - if the configuration is optimised for dejavu sans, nimbus won't be better at all even if it is a better-engineered font (doubtful, though, it being an arial clone from what I understand). Letters will be too close together, sizes and hinting will be off, and that's not even going into the whole rabbit hole of messing with what people are used to, which seems to be the single biggest determining factor as to what they find easy to read once the basics are covered...
The purpose of a font stack is to let the browser use the website's font preference. So "but Arial is already the default on Windows" is not a valid retort; we _want_ the browser to use Arial, even is it is _not_ the default.
A website can prefer what it wants; that doesn't make it a good practice. I keep asking WHY 'we' prefer this particular font because there generally should be a good reason when going out of our way to avoid responsive design; doing what works best for the platform is good practice. Hence why we have an entirely separate layout for mobile, for instance, and specific apps from some of them. Different desktop platforms, too, are different.
Similarly, when people override their platform's defaults, generally they have a good reason to do so. Considering this, we should have an even better reason if we're going to go overriding those overrides - especially if this is simply back to the defaults.
Nimbus fonts come from URW++, a respected foundry, and their font are quite well engineered. They released some of their fonts under a free licence for the GhostScript project, but I do not know if the fonts are still maintained (but I suspect so, as GhostScript has active development).
It all boils down to preference. Of cource people are used to how things look, but change is not always necessarily a bad thing.
Don't dismiss preference so blithely. The psychological processes that go into determining preferences are huge; when our brains are rearranging themselves based on what we're used to, dismissing that as 'just' preferring what we're used to makes no sense. The details of particular character forms are relatively minor, of course, but like how a language a person grew up on will shape all of their future interactions with all languages, even in the short term we do come to expect letters to be a certain way.
So yes, different people prefer different things. This is good. It means we're still human.
-I