Or maybe they use natural language because they have no choice. If Nadella or Biden could just push some buttons to make things happen, they probably would. I know I would.
> "it's not important if the default font is used".
That's also what they said. They said "You may as well just do 'serif' or 'sans-serif' and be done with it."
> Now I understand that you also say that default fonts are not necessarily well designed.
While fonts are a matter of taste, objectively speaking fonts that comes preinstalled on systems often have very few weights and support only a very limited range of glyphs. They also lack features such as small caps, old-style numbers, etc.
Usually, though, the main, default sans-serif and/or UI font on the system are much better than some random font that just happens to be included in the system. So you will usually be better off using `sans-serif` than any of these font stacks.
> I guess that happens when people assume that the web font will be loaded and don't default to (sans-)serif in their font-familly CSS property.
But this is just yet another reason why using font stacks is bad...? If instead you just use `serif` or `sans-serif` it will follow the user's font preference.
Yes, and that's exactly the problem with this approach. There's no accounting for the different metrics of the fonts.
Font size and font family should ideally always be set together. If you're setting a font-size, then you should force a font-family, and vice versa. Otherwise, you should set neither and let the user agent decide. This ensures that you would never get a broken combination that's uncomfortable or unusable.
It's similar to the idea that whenever you're setting a foreground color, you should always set the background color as well.
> System UI: risky, it’s a trap, there’s basically no legitimate scenario for these semantics on the public web.
How else would you style things with the system's UI font? User interfaces on the web can be designed to fit in the native system UI. It's a legitimate and useful thing to do.
I don't see how you can make a meaningful distinction between what's "online" or "on the public web" or not. A lot of web apps can run both online and offline, installed or uninstalled. In all cases it uses the same web technology.
Just because some legacy system makes a bad choice, doesn't mean everyone can't have nice things. I mean, did Windows seriously make all their UI use a single font? Do they just assume all the UI on Windows would be monolingual...?
I mean, it's standard practice to use a Latin font and fallback to other fonts for complex scripts such as CJK, because it's universally acknowledged that the Latin glyphs in these fonts are terrible and unfit even for the purpose of using it with the CJK characters.
Instead of discouraging or even removing it, how about actually encouraging people to use `system-ui` to force Microsoft and other companies to fix their systems?
> I use "font-family: system-ui, sans-serif" on my resume page [...] If you're creating a user interface with really tight tolerances on element size or appearance, different strategies might be more appropriate.
Shouldn't it be the opposite? It literally has "UI" in the name, and according to the the spec, "The purpose of system-ui is to allow web content to integrate with the look and feel of the native OS."
The text on a resume is not UI, and it has no need to fit the look and feel of the native OS. In this case you should just use `serif` or `sans-serif`. If you're creating a user interface, then it would be appropriate to use `system-ui`.
The say, "then you don't care about typography at all." You say, "If [...] it's not so important [...]" To me, it sounds like you two are in agreement. If it's not important, i.e. if you don't care about it, then it's fine.
> If I want to display a document with some atmosphere for which several fonts could be suitable
There's no such thing as "several fonts could be suitable". All the fonts in these stacks have different metrics, so you can't even set appropriate values for something as basic as the font size and line spacing.
If you design your page using Gill Sans Nova, for example, and someone views it with DejaVu Sans — congratulations, the text now looks something like 50% bigger than you intend it to be. And if you set a sensible size for DejaVu Sans, someone will get unreadable text with some other font. This is not "very good". It's bad.
It might be okay to use these font stacks as fallback when the custom font doesn't work, but it's not "the better solution" if you care about typography.
> I care more about performance and resource usage
It's a valid concern but fonts aren't really that big. Some people are shipping favicons that are like 40kB. That's enough to fit a font.
> The default generic font will probably be a well designed font that the user is used to
System fonts aren't necessarily well designed. And I'm not sure why "the user is used to it" is a good thing. It seems to be the opposite. People complain when a font is familiar to the point that it feels tired and overused.
> Since fonts are mostly a matter of taste anyway, it's not clear the user will prefer this custom font
The user is always in control. They can always choose what to load and what styles to apply. That doesn't mean people should stop designing webpages that looks good.
The comparison between the context length and what humans can hold in their heads just seems faulty.
I'm not sure I can agree that humans cannot hold 25,000 words worth of information in their heads. For the average person, if they read 25,000 words, which can be done in a single sitting, they're not going to remember all of it, for sure, but they would get a lot out of it that they could effectively reason with and manipulate.
Not to mention that humans don't need to hold the entire report in their head because they can hold it in their hand and look at it.
And if anything, I think it's more significant to have a bigger working memory for GPT's own outputs than it is for the inputs. Humans often take time to reflect on issues, and we like to jot down our thoughts, particularly if it involves complex reasoning. Giving something long, careful thought allow us to reason much better.
Fully agree, but the problem is not really specific to AI. Most search results today, whether written by humans or machines, tend to be mindless, inaccurate, and unhelpful n-th hand summaries produced with very little effort.
And this doesn't seem unreasonable, given that you get everything for free or at a very low cost. When you pay for high quality books or periodicals, you get in return much better sourced information written by people who know a lot more about the subject they're writing on than the average journalist or AI language model.
Yes, occasionally one might find high quality contents in blogs, forums, wikis, or open-access periodicals, but far more are locked inside proprietary platforms or behind paywalls that do very little to actually compensate the authors.
Search engines and content platforms are supposed to make it easier to find what you want. But the reality is that it's a lose-lose situation for both the writer and the reader. The writer is forced to give up their contents at a very low price and overpay for ads, while the reader is left with low quality contents that aren't relevant to their needs. But neither can escape the monopoly, who alone profits at everyone else's expense.