Re:Making a programming language using Rust
by chrismorgan on Monday November 09, 2020 @01:40AM
(#25032001)
I find font-family stacks to regularly be a source of amusement and/or bafflement. Here’s this site’s main one:
font-family: freight-text, Iowan Old Style, Georgia, system-ui, -apple-system, Segoe UI, Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Noto Sans, sans-serif;
I… what? The web-font serif, then a macOS (I think?) serif, then a Windows serif, then… system-ui stuff which is almost always sans-serif, then sans-serif fallbacks. This is a bizarre mixture.
This immediately makes much more sense:
font-family: freight-text, Iowan Old Style, Georgia, serif;
And I tend to think just this would be better:
font-family: freight-text, serif;
Also, one other rule that I can’t let pass by without comment:
letter-spacing: .01em;
Bumping letter-spacing is always risky: the designer chose the spacing they did for a reason. Pretty much the only circumstances you should do it are (a) very specific display purposes (that is, headings and the likes—typically 0.2em or more) and (b) all caps (typically something like 0.07ex). Body text letter-spacing bumps are almost always a bad idea. In this case, it’s even already using a fairly wide font. (Well, so long as freight-text is used. I really wish all font properties (font-, letter-spacing, &c.*) could be varied by font availability, so that you could do things like bump font-size if you use your own web font with smaller metrics than the likely fallback font.)
This immediately makes much more sense:
And I tend to think just this would be better: Also, one other rule that I can’t let pass by without comment: Bumping letter-spacing is always risky: the designer chose the spacing they did for a reason. Pretty much the only circumstances you should do it are (a) very specific display purposes (that is, headings and the likes—typically 0.2em or more) and (b) all caps (typically something like 0.07ex). Body text letter-spacing bumps are almost always a bad idea. In this case, it’s even already using a fairly wide font. (Well, so long as freight-text is used. I really wish all font properties (font-, letter-spacing, &c.*) could be varied by font availability, so that you could do things like bump font-size if you use your own web font with smaller metrics than the likely fallback font.)