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Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

public-sans.digital.gov

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Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#131

Post by Someone1234 »

lwf wrote: post #118
Someone1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Accessibility technologies now fully support a JS enabled web, with accessibility standards following suit. That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript ( I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to AD…

Working without JS is still a core requirement of GDS sites; c.f. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... and for more as to why: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

In 2013.

They're now building sites to meet WCAG 2.1 which does support the usage of JavaScript for accessible users.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#133

Post by Someone1234 »

nulbyte wrote: post #97
Someone1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Accessibility technologies now fully support a JS enabled web, with accessibility standards following suit. That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript ( I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to AD…

I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a public-facing government website. It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience. Or, write a decent site to start with, and you wouldn't have to worry about degrading. The entire page is nothing but a shell for a web app written in JavaScript that doesn't need to be a web app written entirely in JavaScript.

> It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience.

You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser?

Seems unreasonable to dedicate resources to that, that could be better spent on 99% of our users. Why should the 1% get special treatment? And what other parts of their browser can they disable that we need to support, perhaps no CSS? Maybe IE5? Maybe they only render XHTML? Etc.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#134

Post by Moru »

carapace wrote: post #117
Someone1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Accessibility technologies now fully support a JS enabled web, with accessibility standards following suit. That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript ( I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to AD…

As one of "those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript" this comment is pretty disappointing.

As another user disabling js: Not entirely unexpected.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#135

Post by gnicholas »

zestyping wrote: post #105
zestyping wrote: post #85

Why does the "j" have a larger dot than the "i"? Is there any reason for this? It just looks like an error to me.

Filed, and got a response right away! https://github.com/uswds/uswds/issues/3024

That's really cool. OTOH, how did this not get noticed before now? The letters are literally right next to each other in the alphabet.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#136

Post by vesinisa »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #129
vesinisa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must applaud your legislators for their foresight when they wrote the federal copyright charter. All works by. U.S. federal employees are in public domain, forming one of the planet's largest bodies of free online resources. The cultural impact of this collection is considerable also globally. In my country, all tax-funded government works are copyrighted. It's an ongoing battle to make each department release thei…

Doesn't apply to works by contractors paid by the government though. I don't know which this font is.

Seems to be Open Font License since the font is based on Libre Franklin, which is OFL licensed.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#137

Post by yawaramin »

nulbyte wrote: post #97
Someone1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Accessibility technologies now fully support a JS enabled web, with accessibility standards following suit. That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript ( I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to AD…

I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a public-facing government website. It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience. Or, write a decent site to start with, and you wouldn't have to worry about degrading. The entire page is nothing but a shell for a web app written in JavaScript that doesn't need to be a web app written entirely in JavaScript.

Answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19609249

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#140

Post by bmogilefsky »

OliverJones wrote: post #110

Interesting that this web site uses a Let's Encrypt certificate. I suppose it saves the maintainers from being gouged by a beltway bandit charging thousands to monitor and then update an ordinary CA-issued certificate.

(I work for 18F but don't officially represent it here.)

The site is hosted via Federalist (https://federalist.18f.gov/) a SaaS which runs on top of sibling Platform as a Service cloud.gov (https://cloud.gov), which is based on Cloud Foundry. (Think of cloud.gov as "government-compliant and -operated Heroku" and you're not too far off.)

One of the benefits of using cloud.gov is that it automatically brokers and renews certs from Let's Encrypt... Math is math, and there's no sense spending taxpayer money where we don't have to! Here's the page about it, including a link to the broker source at the bottom: https://cloud.gov/docs/services/cdn-route/

Both are operated by 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov)... We're all feds! If anyone is interested in joining us check out https://18f.gsa.gov/join/

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