
If you use Montserrat from Google Fonts your site is probably broken now - esistgut
https://github.com/JulietaUla/Montserrat/issues/60
======
exikyut
Seriously, Google. Stop taking Facebook's advice. At your scale, "move fast
and break things" raises entire industries to the ground in one fell swoop
when something is unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire.

Okay, we get it, you're so insecure and your corporate management is so fickle
and uncertain _everything_ is in a constant state of flux. But we, the general
public, aren't supposed to be aware of how much of everything is on fire. It's
unprofessional when you leak that much information. You're not hiding your
tells very effectively...

Be more like swans. Feet flipping like mad _under_ the water, calm and serene
on the surface. Be consistent. Be predictable. Be something everyone can count
on. Nobody knows what you'll pull the plug on next week. What you replace it
with doesn't matter. "Look at us we augmented our muscles so we can run faster
than cheetahs!!1" is just passive-aggressive and rude. _Technically_ it's an
undeniably viable way to compete, _practically_ your laundry list of
unimpressed casualties isn't getting any shorter. You need to look at the
bigger picture and stop just hyperfocusing on the clinical, sterile
mathematical stance.

I remember opening a javascript file somewhere between 2006-2009 and seeing
the string "don't be evil'" (including the single quotes, just like that - the
weird formatting is why I remember it verbatim). That disappeared a few years
ago. Can we have that back? You're currently into a race into the ground, and
you'll be dead within the next 20 years if you don't stop.

~~~
qarioz
> Be consistent. Be predictable.

That's what we do. I use only gmail, drive, analytics, Adwords, google play
and youtube. I'm treating everything else as unstable or beta. Even their
cloud offerings.

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CM30
Hmm, seems like Google may be the ones who screwed up here, by not having a
versioning system on Google Fonts. If they did (and guaranteed that fonts
wouldn't change after being selected), this wouldn't have happened.

Then again, part of me wonders whether fonts should be updated in general.
Version control and regular updates work fine for programs and what not, but
fonts are really like images in that people only care what they look like at
the time they use them. Changing a font's weight or design like this seems
like the equivalent of a stock photo program swapping out images because they
think the lighting wasn't done right or the choice of model was wrong. Yes it
may be 'objectively' better, but it'd just break a lot of existing use cases
for little gain.

Still, that's just my thoughts on the situation.

------
WallWextra
What makes this guy think it's acceptable to talk to people like this?

~~~
jakevn
From a rational and removed standpoint, it is clearly not acceptable. There
are some confounding factors here, however. For one, Google specifically
advises to use their hosted version of the font instead of self-hosting.
Another issue is that these people are clearly frustrated by the nonchalant
attitude of the maintainers when it comes to breaking others work.

If you are telling people to use your hosted version of your open-source
contribution yet have no care for responsible stewardship, you are being
irresponsible at the expense of others.

If you don’t want emotional responses after purposefully breaking the hard
work of many, you are being unreasonable. While we should strive to be
respectful and courteous under such tension, I can understand that not
everyone is successful every time.

In other words, I think empathy should go both ways here. Usually, I find that
others act very unreasonably and rudely towards maintainers of open source
contributions. In this case, I think both parties have made mistakes that
deserve forgiving (but not ignoring), including the rude emotional reactions.
Both parties should apologize to one another.

~~~
robalfonso
It appears this issue was brought up previously on Feb 21. So you've got a
group of people who already raised the issue seeing it happening again.

They may have been more reserved on the first go around but I can empathize
with them seeing red now.

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gabemart
I find this a bit confusing. Montserrat is distributed under an open license
[1] which allows commercial redistribution "as long as they [fonts] are not
sold by themselves". If people want to use a specific version - and clearly,
they feel very strongly about it - why not host it themselves?

    
    
        [1] https://github.com/JulietaUla/Montserrat/blob/master/OFL.txt

~~~
busterarm
Because Google goes out of their way to advise you not to self-host fonts and
to use theirs?

Versioning isn't really a huge ask, in my opinion. My experience with Google
APIs in general has always been that expectations don't match results.
Documentation never matches the specification. This goes double for their own
API clients, especially if the language is not Python or Go.

It's sort of maddening how much the company wants you to rely on them for
everything and simultaneously not give any concern to how usable their
products are.

------
PhantomGremlin
I haven't yet seen the big picture discussed here in the comments:

Sometimes things change because people need to justify their jobs!

A lot of people would be out of jobs if their status reports said, week after
week: "everything is fine, it all works, no complaints, no improvements
needed, we've leaving everything as it is".

It's just that simple. It's probably the reason why most software related
things change.

Unfortunately sometimes things change for the worse. E.g. in the Apple world,
AirPort Utility was rewritten and lost functionality. Disk Utility was
rewritten and lost functionality. But _someone_ at Apple got to put down on
their status that they "simplified" or "improved" or "updated" or (whatever)
those programs.

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tinus_hn
Why do people expect web font metrics to be pixel perfect? The user may
(gasp!) even block web font downloads.

~~~
jbob2000
A lot of thought goes into designs. People labour over these things for
months. It's a stab in the heart to see it all get thrown out the window. Why
spend that time at all if it's just going to get thrown out? You feel
meaningless when this happens.

99% of users don't block web font downloads. Do a quick search for how to
block font downloads on your computer. It's a technical task.

~~~
tinus_hn
It's not really fair to blame Google (or someone else) because you built a
giant house of cards and a gust of wind blew it away, even if it is a bit sad
and people put a lot of work in it. According to this article, even the very
easy workaround of hosting the font yourself is too much to ask.

Still it's a matter of time before the rendering engines change to another
correct interpretation of the specification and everything falls apart again.

This all reminds me of that ridiculous thing of the late zeroes that was
'Sifr'. No, you don't get to run 20 Flash applets on your text page just so
you can show fancy headings.

------
jacobr
I understand that you can be frustrated in a situation like this, but do they
act like this in person as well if someone makes a mistake or if they have a
disagreement?

I don't even see why they bring up the poor version handling of Google Fonts
in this issue. They should send the feedback to Google or stop using Google's
services.

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thebiglebrewski
I think this is the most strongly word GitHub thread I've seen so far?

------
dictum
Spare a minute to do the opposite of this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623604)

