Re: Default font for the web site

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Simon,

No. In my experience doing typography for people, for every typeface that one 
person likes, another loathes it. Taste in type is very personal and very 
emotive – you can never win and satisfy all. Everybody now has their own expert 
opinion, even though typography is a very refined and difficult art.

I have found that for those who care about type, they will adjust their 
browsers. For those that don’t, it does not matter.

However, if you want to present an overall fine design feel to the website, 
then you have to serve specific fonts using webfont technology, which took a 
very long time to mature, but is now excellent – providing you use a very high 
speed low latency webfont server to reduce page load time and ‘font flash’. You 
could use Google Fonts I suppose, but commercial servers with other fonts are 
expensive and go against the open source nature of the project. Serving 
webfonts off your own local server is rarely fast enough.

Saying this myself even at all, I feel we are bike-shedding. The whole website 
is is need of a total renovation to bring it into line with contemporary look 
and feel, design, and usage. But even so, it currently serves its purpose just 
fine. I am happy with it as it is. We have a nuclear reactor to build, not a 
bikeshed to paint.

By the way, do not disparage Times New Roman so. Times is a deservedly fine 
font. You see – people can’t agree!

Andrew


On 3/03/2016, 10:08, "Simon Albrecht" <address@hidden on behalf of 
address@hidden> wrote:

made me think that we really should specify a default font for our web site. 
Else the 
browser will be left to choose, eventually presenting the user with 
Times New Roman, if he hasn’t made a better choice yet. Shouldn’t we 
avoid that?