On Thursday 13 March 2014 08:38 PM, Niklas Laxström wrote:
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. ULS is not a good comparison point because of
the following.
1) Universal Language selector is trying to solve a much harder issue
than what webfonts are usually used for. It is trying to avoid tofu
(missing fonts) which brings a whole list of issues which are not
present or are much smaller otherwise:
* large fonts for complex scripts,
* detecting which fonts are missing,
* many fonts per page,
* the systems with greatest need of fonts often have bad renderers.
2) WMF has a lot of experience working with web fonts by now. We know
how to handle different formats, how to optimally compress fonts and
how to check the results in different systems and browsers. In some
areas we are even ahead of Google, like non-latin fonts.
I wonder why people want to serve webfonts by default, eventhough most
Wikipedia users don't need it. Webfonts is a nice option, and it must be
an option so as if any user or language need it, they can choose it.
Overruling a user's / community's settings without asking their opinion
is against any freedom WMF represents.
There are various other 'real' issues which are affecting, contribution
and rendering of Wikimedia wikis in non-latin languages.
Thus, I think that delivering a relative small fonts for simple
scripts like latin and cyrillic is something that is possible *if* we
are willing to accept that it will take some bandwidth and that page
load experience can be affected* if the font is not cached or present
locally.
-Niklas
* The unwanted effects of using webfonts are getting smaller and
smaller with modern browsers.
And requirement of webfonts is also getting smaller and smaller with
modern OSs. Even today's mobile OSs have better language support than
that of old desktop OSs.
Praveen
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