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Oh wow. This guy changed the font to Arial(!) because "Using WebFonts for "body" text - paragraphs, h3 and lower - seems like a loser's game to me. The visual d

Oh wow. This guy changed the font to Arial(!) because "Using WebFonts for "body" text - paragraphs, h3 and lower - seems like a loser's game to me. The visual differences to system fonts are usually not detectable at these small size". It's not just the font that's grotesque here. Of course a 'normal user' isn't usually noticing the fonts a website uses. In fact, they shouldn't. But fonts still influence how people perceive the website. Using this guy's insane logic, we could get rid of all craftsmen, because nobody notices the details anyway. Even more tragic: Rubygems was apparently loading 12 styles&weights of that font and only using two. He could've thrown out the 10 unused variations and gotten almost the same result without resorting to violating someone's design. Why exactly is Rubygems giving idiots access to it's source code?

schneems 11y ago
> Using this guy's insane logic, we could get rid of all craftsmen, because nobody notices the details anyway. Hyperbolic much? > Why exactly is Rubygems giving idiots access to it's source code? It's open source https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems all idiots have access to the source code, even you. I think the words you're looking for are "Thanks for taking the time to make Rubygems faster, and for doing a write up on it to show the costs and benefits of using a webfont. Now I see that style can come at the cost of performance. I'm curious what the speed differences would have been if they had gotten rid of the 10 unused font variations and kept the current webfonts." Even better would have been "I ran the benchmarks for my suggested change and found it to be nearly as fast, I don't think we should sacrifice all visuals for the sake of performance, here's a link to my PR to Rubygems to re-instate the webfonts with a script on how to reproduce my findings. Thanks everyone for all your free open source work, and for sharing what you've learned." I get what you're trying to say, blowing it out of proportion and being highly critical of people doing free work for you in their free time while doing nothing to remedy the situation isn't going to help anyone.
- Angostura 11y ago
  No, what he is trying to say is that the approach that was taken appears misguided. The speed improvement is largely gained by not downloading unwanted font variants. All the work mucking about with the designer's body copy style isn't going to have much effect - unless I'm missing something.
tater_sent_me 11y ago
I force all fonts to be comic sans. Deal with it.

schneems 11y ago

> Using this guy's insane logic, we could get rid of all craftsmen, because nobody notices the details anyway. Hyperbolic much? > Why exactly is Rubygems giving idiots access to it's source code? It's open source https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems all idiots have access to the source code, even you. I think the words you're looking for are "Thanks for taking the time to make Rubygems faster, and for doing a write up on it to show the costs and benefits of using a webfont. Now I see that style can come at the cost of performance. I'm curious what the speed differences would have been if they had gotten rid of the 10 unused font variations and kept the current webfonts." Even better would have been "I ran the benchmarks for my suggested change and found it to be nearly as fast, I don't think we should sacrifice all visuals for the sake of performance, here's a link to my PR to Rubygems to re-instate the webfonts with a script on how to reproduce my findings. Thanks everyone for all your free open source work, and for sharing what you've learned." I get what you're trying to say, blowing it out of proportion and being highly critical of people doing free work for you in their free time while doing nothing to remedy the situation isn't going to help anyone.

Angostura 11y ago
No, what he is trying to say is that the approach that was taken appears misguided. The speed improvement is largely gained by not downloading unwanted font variants. All the work mucking about with the designer's body copy style isn't going to have much effect - unless I'm missing something.

tater_sent_me 11y ago

I force all fonts to be comic sans. Deal with it.