unity-design team mailing list archive

[Remco <remco47@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 22:48, Scott E. Armitage
<launchpad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Remco <remco47@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> This may not be a good idea from a compatibility point of view. Many
>> websites expect sans-serif to mean Arial, serif to mean Times New
>> Roman and monospace Courier New. They expect sentences they write to
>> be in that font, which has a particular size. If we change an Arial
>> sentence to Ubuntu, it will not be the same size and on some pages
>> that will not fit anymore.
>
> Sorry, but if a website wants to use a specific font, then they should
> specify that font in the stylesheet. The terms sans-serif, serif, and
> monospace are keywords that allow the browser to display text using
> the corresponding user-selected fonts.
>
>> Now, we don't have Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier New, since they
>> are not open source. But Red Hat did contribute the Liberation set of
>> fonts, which are completely different fonts, except that the letters
>> are exactly the same size as Arial, Times and Courier. Using these
>> will ensure that web pages don't break.
>
> A web page that relies on the exact pixel-size of a font is broken to
> begin with.
>

That may or may not be true from a developer point of view (I believe
DTPers might object), but from the user's point of view, Ubuntu would
break the web. The web is a messy place, and many broken things have
become part of the standard. The Liberation fonts provide a solution
to the proprietary fonts problem, so there would have to be a very
compelling reason to break compatibility again.

-- 
Remco