> use a serif font for the main text,really,you can keep the headlines sans.

All the web usability studies and web design books I've read that address typography have stated that most people prefer sans-serif typefaces on screens. And the typefaces used by all the top sites reflect this.

I don't have a strong preference either way, but it's important to note that those recommendations came before retina displays. Serif fonts can't be rendered accurately on low-DPI displays. As more people get high-DPI displays, I bet serif fonts will be used more in body text.

This might be news to you, but not everybody has Retina (or equivalent) displays

Umm... That's what I said. "As more people get high-DPI displays, I bet serif fonts will be used more in body text." I was making a prediction, not stating that designers should use one or the other.

If I had to suggest a change in the typography, I'd suggest the opposite. The headings(large text) can have serifs. But the bulk of the body should definitely be sans. Serifs add too much clutter when the font is small.

Add this to your userContent.css: <http://db48x.net/MDN-fix.css>. It fixes the whitespace problems, but I haven't touched fonts. Font size is best corrected by zooming in; Firefox will even remember your zoom level across the whole domain, so you only have to do that once.

A static site generator for a wiki?

That sounds like a good idea, actually. Why not? Generate and store each page each time it's edited, then serve from the static copies. There will be a lot more reads than there are writes anyway.

That's a static page cache, not really the same thing. And I'm pretty sure they're doing this already, or are about to.

We can't generate the whole thing statically, because there are parts of the interface that change with user state.

We do render the HTML for article content, which includes many scripting templates.

We're seeing a lot of interest in the static/caching side of the site. I wonder if we should do a public article about it and invite people to help us improve it.

Can you not serve a static page and then have Javascript fetch the additional, user state-dependent content? At the very least, that will reduce latency for some content.

The public article will surely be interesting even if it is not all that useful...

A cache