Universal themes: a proposal

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le samedi 10 avril 2010 à 16:44 +0200, François Revol a écrit :

> An alternative to embedding the files would be to give urls to locate 
> them.
> CSS does have a provision for this also (though IIRC it's an M$ 
> extension).

Even discarting the legal implications, this is bad too, as people tend
to dump a file on a web server and forget it, so after a while you're
hardcoding an old font file in your theme, even though a newer (fixed)
version may be present on system (we see it a lot with pre-fontconfig
apps: to workaround the lack of a good system-wide font management
layer, they bundled font files with the source code. Looking at new
versions of those apps you find the code had been regularly updated but
the font files are still a snapshot of whatever fonts were popular when
the app was initially released, with the bugs that existed at that time,
even though they've been updated many times over by the font upstream
since).

Unless you intend to rewrite a complete font management layer, it is
much better not to try to shortcut the existing one, and let it manage
all font files. Users really do not like it when the same font is not
rendered the same way in various parts of the screen, because some parts
use the system-wide font & settings, and others some private
app-specific font version or config.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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