On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom@gmail.comwrote:
There have recently been questions whether WMF is able to serve webfonts. Some people think that because of the issues that led to disabling webfonts by default in Universal Language Selector (ULS), WMF is not ready to consider webfonts for typography.
I don't think that way
Me neither; I agree with much of what you are saying.
I'm not sure why Odder abandoned https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115153/ (Odder, I'm sorry if my comments were hurtful for some reason -- and I want to say that I appreciate the fact that you use your technical savvy to help communities make their voices heard in technical forums.) What I was actually going to propose is that the font required by Hebrew Wikisource be loaded unconditionally, for all pages, by being referenced in Common.css. It needs some scrutiny first, but in principle it strikes me as the right way to go.
I also think we should consider biting the performance bullet and including a font like Noto https://code.google.com/p/noto/ on all wikis. Again, not a decision to undertake lightly, but something we should definitely consider. It won't solve the problem of individual wikis needing a font for the content language that is suitable for inputing and editing content, but it may be good enough to cover the cases of occasional content in non-primary scripts on most wikis. I filed < https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59983%3E about that, though to my regret I did so at the height of the ULS drama so my tone was probably not very inviting to future conversation. But if you can stand to ignore it and to think the issue through, please do comment.
And finally: I also absolutely agree with Niklas that there remains a large problem that would not be addressed by either approach, and that a platform like ULS, backed by sufficient data and some trial-and-error experience, represents a good approach for solving that.
There is one other thing that I think we should be doing: we should strive to offer the very best HOWTO on the internet for obtaining and installing additional fonts for users, so that we empower to use the internet in their language, not just on Wikimedia (and MediaWiki) wikis, but across the web. If something like that already exists and I am simply an ignorant oaf (which is quite possible) than I eat my hat by way of apology :)