On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:16 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 16 February 2014 08:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Working towards a more beautiful viewing experience is a secondary objective. Primary is that our readers and editors can read and edit. ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid
that
we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about.
Indeed. What precisely was the problem with ULS?
From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector: "Universal
Language Selector has been disabled on 21-01-2014 to work out some performance issues that had affected the Wikimedia sites." To my understanding part of the major performance issues here related to issues like loading the Autonym font via webfonts.
I probably should not have brought up ULS because feelings are still raw about it and I'm not interested in rehashing its problems, but my point is that it's an example of how delivering webfonts is not a trivial thing for us. No one has offered to spend time on a highly performant webfonts system that can deliver better typography reliably to all Wikimedia sites, and we're certainly not going to officially task a team to do so when there's a reasonable alternative that thousands of users are trying out right now in beta mode.
What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin?
The beta feature has involved lots of testing in non-Latin scripts. It's not perfect yet but we certainly haven't ignored scripts that represent so many users. (Remember we're not talking about something actually that new. A very similar font stack has been in use for 100% of mobile users for more than a year.)
Steven
P.S. Sorry for answering from a different account. My work address is not subscribed to Wikitech.