I wish we could, with Android everwhere, have Linus Torvalds, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs get together and say “OK, we all need to agree to have both a serif and sans font which is on every operating system out there, so that web pages don’t need to download fonts to their users any more.” and then have everyone present say something like “OK, we’ll make Noto Sans and Noto Serif always be available”, or barring that, have Sergey Brin say “OK, we’ll make sure Android phones always have Arimo (sans serif with the same metrics as Arial) and Tinos (serif with the same metrics as Times New Roman) available to use”.
If they could do this, then font stacks could simply be “Font-family: "Noto Sans", sans-serif;” or “Font-family: "Noto Serif", serif;”, or, the not as good but still usable “Font-family: Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;” and “Font-family: Tinos, "Liberation Serif", "Times New Roman", serif;” font stacks. This would solve the pesky “download the fonts” problem.
Another solution would be for Bill Gates to say “I will release the 2002 Core Fonts version of the Georgia typeface under the OFL open source license if Brin will install it on all Android devices moving forward” or better “I will release Cambria and Calibri under the OFL open source license if Steve Jobs and Brin agree to install this font on all Apple computers, iPhones, and Android phones moving forward”
Of course, in the real world, it would logistically be easier to get Steve Jobs to show up alive and well at this meeting then to get all attendees to agree on a font which all operating systems will have.
Another place where it might actually be possible to pull this off is to have all browser makers, especially Android browsers to include Arimo and Tinos with the browser moving forward. Actually, it looks like Arimo/Tinos are already on most Android phones: https://help.xara.com/article/440-web-safe-fonts-on-android-...
Edit: Based on testing, Arimo is on my somewhat older Android phone, with the same metrics as Arial on my Windows 10 desktop machine, but, annoyingly enough, while Tinos also looks to be there, it doesn’t have the same metrics as Times New Roman on my Windows 10 desktop machine. So, yeah, “Font-family: Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;” is pretty much the only font stack we can use and be guaranteed to have the same metrics across mostly everything.
I can squeeze in just the regular and italic text of a serif font in 53,512 bytes, so we can get a consistent looking serif across platforms at the cost of 52.26KiB, and then just use Arial/Arimo (the only across-the-board websafe font stack where we can retain font metrics) for sans text.
If they could do this, then font stacks could simply be “Font-family: "Noto Sans", sans-serif;” or “Font-family: "Noto Serif", serif;”, or, the not as good but still usable “Font-family: Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;” and “Font-family: Tinos, "Liberation Serif", "Times New Roman", serif;” font stacks. This would solve the pesky “download the fonts” problem.
Another solution would be for Bill Gates to say “I will release the 2002 Core Fonts version of the Georgia typeface under the OFL open source license if Brin will install it on all Android devices moving forward” or better “I will release Cambria and Calibri under the OFL open source license if Steve Jobs and Brin agree to install this font on all Apple computers, iPhones, and Android phones moving forward”
Of course, in the real world, it would logistically be easier to get Steve Jobs to show up alive and well at this meeting then to get all attendees to agree on a font which all operating systems will have.
Another place where it might actually be possible to pull this off is to have all browser makers, especially Android browsers to include Arimo and Tinos with the browser moving forward. Actually, it looks like Arimo/Tinos are already on most Android phones: https://help.xara.com/article/440-web-safe-fonts-on-android-...
Edit: Based on testing, Arimo is on my somewhat older Android phone, with the same metrics as Arial on my Windows 10 desktop machine, but, annoyingly enough, while Tinos also looks to be there, it doesn’t have the same metrics as Times New Roman on my Windows 10 desktop machine. So, yeah, “Font-family: Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;” is pretty much the only font stack we can use and be guaranteed to have the same metrics across mostly everything.
I can squeeze in just the regular and italic text of a serif font in 53,512 bytes, so we can get a consistent looking serif across platforms at the cost of 52.26KiB, and then just use Arial/Arimo (the only across-the-board websafe font stack where we can retain font metrics) for sans text.