On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 22:48, Scott E. Armitage <launch...@scott.armitage.name> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Remco <remc...@gmail.com> 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 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp