On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Amir E. Aharoni<[email protected]> wrote:
> Bug 2361 is very closely related, but it is only about the Tamil
> Wikipedia. It should be available everywhere.
I've generalized the bug report (maybe I should have opened a new one
instead, oh well) and commented. Reproducing comment here in case
anyone has comments:
There are potentially serious issues with including zillions of web fonts that
may or may not be needed. Some of them are big downloads, and WebKit refuses
to lay out text until the font is downloaded. If a local font has the
characters, that would be greatly preferable.
Would font-family: sans-serif, mycustomfont; mean "use mycustomfont, but only
if the characters aren't available in the default local font"? The CSS 3 Fonts
spec says it should, but CSS 2.1 seems vague; does it work in practice, and if
so, in what browsers? In particular, do browsers download the font
unnecessarily? Do they support unicode-range (I'm guessing IE doesn't)?
In an ideal world, it *should* be safe to have some custom font-families
defined, and do something like this on all wikis:
html { font-family: sans-serif, Wikimedia-custom-font; }
#p-lang { font-family: sans-serif; /* avoid downloading custom fonts just for
interlanguage links */ }
I don't know if that would work in the real world without unpleasant side
effects.
If we can use unicode-range effectively, then we can just deliver existing free
fonts. If it's not, then we should combine the ones we need into a single
file, so that browsers don't have to download a bunch of files in a row to
figure out which one has the characters they actually need.
A lot depends on browser implementation here. If some browser doesn't support
falling back on a character-by-character basis, then it will be a lot more
painful to support this effectively. In fact I guess it would be impossible,
for that browser, to automatically use web fonts without screwing up people's
choice of default fonts for some of the text. Is anyone willing to test out
IE, Firefox 3.5, and the appropriate Safari version to see how they behave?
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