Default fonts in Firefox

[James Livingston]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 01:33 -0500, Ming Hua wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 11:43:48AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Webpages are not one of these purposes.  A website is not entitled to
> > expect that the user's system will have any particular font (or a
> > reasonable-looking font with particular metrics).
> 
> I would argue it is somehow entitiled to.  After all, Microsoft released
> some of its fonts with no charge for exactly this reason.  There are
> lots of websites that are designed with some certain fonts, and if you
> change the fonts, they are going to look very ugly, such as wraped
> lines, image covered texts, etc.  Granted, this is bad web design, and
> I've said I would see them as broken websites.  But the reality is that
> many websites do so, and HTML allow them to specify the fonts they want,
> and since certain fonts are installed on every Windows machine, they
> look good on most computers.

If a site breaks with wrapped lines or image covered text due to
different font metrics, it will probably also break under a large number
of other conditions. Those site will probably not work if I increase the
default font size, or any other change that people commonly make.

The designer of a web page isn't entitled to _any_ guarantee about how
it will look on my system. Yes, HTML does allow designers to specify
which font to use, but they are specified as a list (containing one of
sans-serif, serif or mono). A site is definitely broken if it specifies
a list of fonts e.g. "Verdana, Ariel, Helvetica, sans-serif" and it
doesn't work with all the fonts listed.


James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
SCSI is not magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is
necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then.
    -- John Woods
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