10 ms·

Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers

127 points by morisy 11y ago

ahoge 11y ago
As a NoScript user, I rarely see web fonts and I prefer it this way. The text shows up instantaneously and the font will look great and be perfectly readable. Most web fonts don't look that nice on Windows. Windows heavily relies on hinting and doing this properly is a lot of hard mind-numbing work. Most web fonts also aren't that readable. Sure, your wide/thin/square font looks very modern and stuff, but it's not as readable as a Verdana or Arial. When I visit your site, I'm there for the text, not the font.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  I'm there for the text, not the font Me too. In Firefox on OS X, I simply set Lucida Grande as my default font, and I uncheck the box that allows pages to choose their own fonts. I don't think I'm missing much.
  - mrec 11y ago
    I did the same in FF/Win - web fonts were a huge step back in my opinion - but immediately discovered a bunch of sites (including GitHub) abusing web fonts for button images, which made them pretty much unusable. Have you found a selective workaround for this?
    - coffeedrinker 11y ago
      I use Chrome and a plugin called Font Changer that lets one override fonts on pages. I don't need to have it turned on for all sites but it can be done. Mostly I just have everything set to Arial (I don't like reading any serif fonts on screen). Perhaps there is a plugin for Firefox that does a similar thing.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      With uMatrix you can selectively enable various features for sites. I tend to start with minimal sets and re-enable to the point I've achieved sufficient functionality for my needs.
- RexRollman 11y ago
  I know you are specifically talking about web fonts but let's face it: a lot of the modern web sucks ass. I don't want my browser downloading custom fonts, autoplay videos, animated GIFs, or CSS elements that move around on their own (or refuse to move when I scroll). I am also not interested having my browser download javascript or tracking cookies from dozens of third party domains when I visit a site.
  - gopowerranger 11y ago
    Your complaint is about design and how the site serves the page, not web fonts. Knowledgeable developers know how to deliver web fonts quickly and web fonts that looks good on your system. Unless you're paying by the byte, what gets downloaded shouldn't concern you from a well-developed site that doesn't hang on your phone. Unfortunately, in this copy/paste era, too many sites shoot themselves in the foot.
    - arbitrage 11y ago
      You, or anyone, don't get to tell people what concerns them. If they care about it, it's a concern. The cause of the concern should then be addressed, not the person having the concern.
      - gopowerranger 11y ago
        People are "concerned" about a lot of crazy things that shouldn't bother them.
        narrowrail 11y ago
        This is good to have someone that defends these modern practices. My problem concerns NPR (i.e. npr.org) and their direction for the use of Drupal with a specific config for the sites for their local affiliates that often requires Google js for the site to function properly. Practically speaking, this will not impact most visitors, but most of these people are being pigeonholed without knowing it for advertising purposes. I have a big problem with this. It is now affecting non-technical people b/c of the use of (ad)blockers on iOS.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- snsr 11y ago
  Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript. You are correct about Windows having objectively terrible font rendering though, and not just in web browsers.
  - ahoge 11y ago
    > Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript. NoScript blocks fonts, video, audio, and JavaScript.
tcdent 11y ago
> "...if you’re a user, chances are, you’re quite relieved (or even ecstatic) at the ability to block web fonts and experience a faster web." These days, with increased processing power and standards adoption generally available, we really have been able to push the weight of websites. Conversely, battery powered devices and sketchy wideband internet access are growing rapidly. Sure, we have the power, but it's becoming apparent that at this scale effeciency is very important. More users than ever want more content faster than ever. Globalized (literally) asset sharing, with technologies like digest references in script and link tags could make a big difference. Why not even pre-package really popular stuff (jQuery, Helvetica, etc) with the browser or OS?
- striking 11y ago
  You may have forgotten that Helvetica licenses cost money. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Feel free to buy me one, I'm a starving designer :) Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
  - radicalbyte 11y ago
    Buy? For the web it's worse - they nickel and dime you based on the number of visitors to your site. It's an subscription.
- notatoad 11y ago
  The popular stuff should be just as performant as if it were packaged with the browser - most sites are pulling jquery from one of the big CDNs and caching it for as long as possible. You aren't downloading jquery for every site that needs it, you're downloading it once for the thousands of sites that use the same cdn. Packaging it into the browser is just going to introduce a whole bunch of complexity around versioning and updates and standardization.
narsil 11y ago
As a user, I hope this pushes designers to consider the aesthetics of a page rendered in a font supported by the browser. Unlike JavaScript, a web page rarely needs a custom font to function, so designers must assume users would block custom fonts if preferable.
- andyfleming 11y ago
  Yeah, but in reality, designers may just turn back to static images to maintain a consistent appearance. That would force a step backwards.
  - dragonne 11y ago
    Hopefully we can find a more pleasing medium. For example, if designers used web fonts with metrics that match common built-ins the FOUT could be made much less jarring. (Yes, ligatures and such make that difficult in the general case, but it surely could be good enough for headlines.)
andyfleming 11y ago
There are some interesting issues at play here. There is obviously some desire to have levels of standardized-form content that can be consumed in the way that the user desires. However, I disagree with a closed internet. Websites, like brick and mortar businesses, should be able to do what they want. They are responsible for the user's experience and should be able to craft it as they see fit. A browser (or extensions) should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may not want to experience the internet. (Ads in partciular, are a unique part of the discussion). I appreciate websites like medium, reddit, facebook, pinterest, and others that standardized content formats for users to experience in a consitent way. The "death of RSS" is related here too. It's a complex issue. With RSS the user has significantly more control, but the problem is that you lose context and it can often become hard to browse large amounts of content.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Browser should let user choose which kind of experience they desire. Unfortunately, both websites AND web browsers are set on taking choices from users and forcing agenda on them.
  - striking 11y ago
    Web browsers are becoming better at accommodating user choice, though. More and more browsers have extensions or content filtering tools, which are an extension of the user's power into their view of the web. And if there's a site that really forces its agenda on you, don't use it. If enough people agree that it's not useful enough to be worth the trouble, it'll stop existing eventually.
- binarycrusader 11y ago
  Sorry, but the idea that the client (browser) doesn't get to choose the experience is fundamentally incompatible with the architecture of the web. I don't see how you can call that a "closed" internet; quite the opposite. From the very beginning, almost every standard related to the web has made it very clear that ultimately clients get to choose what to display, what to retrieve, and how to display it. Yes, that freedom comes with a price, but it's a price worth paying. For users that are visually impaired, it's particularly important to be able to override the suggestions of the content being displayed. I don't see how there's an "agenda" involved in what any web browsers are doing today. The end user is the one choosing to use the client, choosing to use the content blocker, etc. If Apple or Google made the choice to start blocking content using the browser itself (on their own), you might have a point, but that hasn't happened (yet).
MattSteelblade 11y ago
I agree with the author on his main point, but his statement, "[w]ebsites should not come with minimum software requirements," only works in a perfect world. Unless it can be shown in ROI, there is no reason to develop for anything but a modern browser (I'm looking at you old versions of IE).
- ddebernardy 11y ago
  You might have the ROI question upside down. The overhead of developing for IE - even older ones - is small if you ignore bells and whistles. There are a few CSS gotchas to worry about and that's about it. A webpage shouldn't require megs of JS and assets and what have you to work. The real question is whether the time you spend on these bells and whistles contribute a positive ROI.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    It might, for a commercial site. Flashy can sell, depending on the business.
dragonne 11y ago
While we're discussing problems with web fonts, let's not forget the other common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don't seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-issue HP laptop. Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there's always reader mode.
- tcdent 11y ago
  From a marketing perspective, we kept getting really excited seeing screen resolutions rise and font rendering improve for our audience. Now designers can just design, not "for-web", which used to be a very restrictive medium compared to what could be achieved with a pixel editor. We realize some strange folks somewhere are still running IE6, but they aren't the ones responding to our campaigns anyway.
  - blub 11y ago
    Somewhere along the way designers forgot that design is not just about pretty things, but also being able to comfortably use the said things.
  - xorcist 11y ago
    Or as they said ten years ago: "Did you know your web page is unreadable in Firefox?" "Yeah, but our analysis shows very few of our visitors use Firefox."
    - tcdent 11y ago
      But really, it's the only sane way. Sorry, my QA guy is not going to test with Konqueror just because you happen to like it.
analog31 11y ago
In my view, fonts are just another case of potential conflicting interests between content creators and content consumers. I can easily imagine wanting to override the fonts chosen by content creators, for instance if a vision impaired person wants to substitute a more readable font (or even let a text-to-speech program take over). Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my 9600 baud dial-up connection.
- mrob 11y ago
  I disable web fonts, because the most legible font is the font you're most used to reading. Fancy typography is the graphic design version of loudness war music mastering - something to gain attention and seem attractive in the short term, but unpleasant in the long term. In both cases there's a tragedy of the commons situation. People compete to stand out and make things worse for everybody. Blocking web fonts helps prevent this market failure.
  - grey-area 11y ago
    Legibility is important, but it's not the only reason to choose a font. The form of words (font, colour, size, context) also helps tell you what they mean. I agree the reader should be able to override appearance when it suits them, but there's nothing bad about content creators using form as well as content to communicate. Feel free to block web fonts, but you should recognise you are losing something more important than mere decoration by doing so.
    - mrob 11y ago
      I agree that the form of the words can be a good way to convey information. That's why we have bold and italic. There's no need to change the entire font when you could use those standard variations of a familiar font. You're also losing something important (familiarity) by allowing designers to change fonts at will, and I argue that's a greater loss.
- 11y ago
striking 11y ago
This title doesn't accurately describe the content of the article. The author's argument is that web designers should be allowing default fonts while including @font-face fonts, and that Web Fonts had it coming. It also states that ad blockers are just an implementation of the idea of disabling crappy/slow web fonts. And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn't have to cURL your website or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends are cute, but there's nothing like actually being able to read a page. (and if you're using Canvas or something, I've already closed the tab.)
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Please make your website legible. I suspect a huge part of the legibility problems a lot of sites see is the gamma, DPI, and font rendering of the designer's system not matching their audience. A very thin font with gray-on-gray might look great on a calibrated 5K iMac with Safari, but be completely unreadable on Firefox for Windows on a standard 1080p screen with bad colors.
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    I am guilty of only color calibrating my screens (mainly for contrast/gamma reasons, less for straight up color accuracy), and I do this so I get an accurate look at what contrast actually looks like. I have 3x Dell U2414H (absolutely fantastic monitors, if you can find any for sale still (discontinued recently), buy them all up), and display in newest stable Chrome, newest stable Firefox, MSIE11 in Windows with unadjusted ClearType settings (only MSIE11 listens to Cleartype settings, and basically destroys ultra-thin fonts if you adjust Cleartype, so, uh, just leave it alone, trust me), and then Safari on a retina MBP because Safari both has different (possibly better, possibly worse, clearly different) font rendering but also the fact it is on HiDPI increases the difference in how things are rendered on top of it just being Safari.... and if I don't like what I see in all four, then I fiddle with it until text is clearly readable. I'm okay with thin fonts, I actually adore them because they are easier to read on larger font sized text over thicker text, but please check it on a standard Windows non-HiDPI machine, especially if you're a Mac fanatic that loves Safari on a Retina Mac. Just do it.
conductr 11y ago
Seems like use of fonts isn't the issue, it's the fact they have to be served. Why can't browsers embed more fonts?
- striking 11y ago
  Fonts cost money to license. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
  - unethical_ban 11y ago
    *Some fonts.
  - mapt 11y ago
    It may not be in the spirit of the web, but the current state of things is a failure. Less of a failure than 10 years ago, but still a failure. Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a useful thing for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.
    - vacri 11y ago
      A gzipped truetype font is in the order of 100k, though plenty are bigger. 256 of these is ~25MB. Chrome and Firefox are only 45MB to begin with.
  - kzrdude 11y ago
    It's supposed to be a decentralized network. Blocking all non-google or non-typekit webfonts is an example of breaking that vision for the web, which is a shame. I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.
MichaelGG 11y ago
What blockers/browsers should do is just tell scripts that they finished loading. Then sites would continue to work just fine. This kind of technique is gonna be needed to continue ad blocking once a lot of pages start trying to detect blockers and not display content.
- zodiakzz 11y ago
  That would start a needless arms race, there are a million ways to detect if you're using an ad blocker.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Ultimately winnable by the end user. It's DRM all over again. Worst case: An image recog system identifies and blanks out areas that are showing ads. (Or hell, a robot arm puts pieces of paper over the screen.) May as well start the arms race when we know who will finish it.
    - ansgri 11y ago
      re: a robot arm: websites will simply require to connect to a webcam showing you browsing the site to allow viewing. We'd better devise a way to painlessly charge users ¢0.1 per view.
      - LeoNatan25 11y ago
        ¢0.1 per clickbait.
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        True. I suppose they could also serve up an ad-captcha before serving the content.
0xcde4c3db 11y ago
I don't block fonts to make my web experience faster, I block them to reduce my browser's attack surface on untrusted sites. Generally speaking, font-handling code is not exactly notorious for being well-hardened against attacker-controlled data.
kawera 11y ago
I love typography and have no issues with the fonts themselves; font servers are the problem here, making several requests to download not only fonts but also js scripts. We could easily see Google Fonts as Google Analytics in desguise, same for Adobe. Encoding fonts directly into stylesheets works pretty well.
- radicalbyte 11y ago
  Not really, the browser caches these files. They're only loaded once. No requests for subsequent usages. I don't see how that helps for spying on visitors? Google must be doing it to improve performance.
  - kawera 11y ago
    Sure, I give Google the benefit of the doubt in regard to user data collection on GF. As for caching, mobile phones have very small caches and will reload fonts frequently, specially with the large variety of fonts available. And if the browser can cache font files it can also cache stylesheets with base64 encoded fonts, saving requests at the same time.
  - EdwardDiego 11y ago
    > They're only loaded once. No requests for subsequent usages. Are you sure? Typically a <script> tag pointing to a cached script will still trigger a conditional GET.
    - radicalbyte 11y ago
      If you include an expiry date with a cache-control header then the server won't be contacted. I typically use this in combination with a unique suffix (for changes) for my web applications. It appears that google are not doing that, they are indeed using these scripts to track your users. Take jquery for example: Response: Remote Address:[2a00:1450:4009:80a::200a]:443 Request URL:https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js Request Method:GET Status Code:304 OK Response Headers: age:414824 alt-svc:quic=":443"; p="1"; ma=604800 alternate-protocol:443:quic,p=1 date:Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:17:51 GMT expires:Wed, 28 Sep 2016 15:17:51 GMT server:GFE/2.0 status:304
Animats 11y ago
You probably shouldn't be setting your body copy in a downloaded font. That feature is more suitable for display and heading fonts, which are usually much larger than fonts used for body copy. People used to put headings in as images, which is a pain for search engines, screen readers, and everything else that understands HTML.
equil 11y ago
I hope this entices developers to reconsider the use of private use area (PUA) [0] based icon fonts for key navigational elements. I see them used time and again, and a slow connection or spotty CDN can render these sites unusable. [1] If you absolutely have to use icon fonts, at least use ligatures instead of a PUA. That lets you fallback to a whole word if the specific font isn't present, or if the user relies on assistive technology like a screen reader. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas [1] http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png
- gherkin0 11y ago
  Me too. I blocked web fonts in Firefox because a lot of them rendered text like trash when I had font anti-aliasing/sub-pixel rendering disabled (I prefer blocky-crispness to blurry-smoothness). Those stupid icon fonts have been the collateral damage. And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?
  - antod 11y ago
    > And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images? Some reasons: * They are scalable vector images without the download bloat and processing load of rendering them with SVG. * Raster icons need to closely match the screen DPI or they look awful - eg Retina displays made raster icons look like blocky pixellated afterthoughts. * They inherit colors, sizes etc from CSS the same way as their surrounding elements.
- tombrossman 11y ago
  Thanks for explaining the issue so clearly. I see this a lot after installing Privacy Badger and I wondered what it was called. In the rare instances that I needed one of these for page navigation, I've just hovered the mouse pointer over it and guessed at it's purpose by looking at the URL. It's one of those things that are an annoyance, but not quite a big enough issue to spend my time solving it or learning the cause.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Fuck your web fonts. Seriously, just fuck them to hell. I've been online since long before the World Wide Web was a thing, and I've watched the evolution of Web design from TBL's first proposals, through background wallpapers, animated flames, multicoloured layouts, spacing pixels and table-based layouts through to the saviours that were supposed to be CSS and AJAX. It's all been a terrible mistake. I'm leaning to a model in which a standard set of templates exist: article page, index, gallary, catalog, search -- and the client has a set of standard (or custom) templates to view them with. Client overrides server and author. Yes, this means putting all but three Web designers in the world out of work. Couldn't happen soon enough. A recent discovery of mine was that the combination of uMatrix and Stylish is fantastic. As the first blocks by default all CSS, fonts, and JS, I'm given a blank canvas from which I can apply my own preferred stylings (look up Edward Morbius's motherfucking Web page for a general taste). https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ Before this it was a stable of over 1800 local stylesheets, most quite brief and/or standard, to fix common gripes. And it's not just me. A visually disabled friend, totally blind in one eye, 20/60 vision at best with correction in the other, and generally not particularly computer literate, has endless frustrations with gimmicky websites with all the usual crap: low contrast, tiny font sizes, hard-to-read fonts, poor colour choices, content which re-renders multiple times,etc. I just spent an hour at the local Apple store exploring various accessibility options. While there are some for Mac and iOS products, they're terribly insufficient. No way to globally set user font sizes. No way to make "reader mode" the default for either Safari or Firefox. No alternative to mouse and icon interactions in far too many cases. And that's just the OS. The Web as a whole is many times worse. Readability Mode for the entire Web, with a small header space for branding, would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
- 36erhefg 11y ago
  I mostly agree with you. The web itself is wholly incorrectly designed, or should I say evolved incorrectly. Instead of generic content that gets modified to individual users preference, we have the inverse, every site has some special functionality/code and therefore needs a web designer. This is not only increasing complexity, but also cost. With generic web, anyone could make a web page, no coding required, and anyone could read it. You can see that there is actual demand for this, as there are emerging solutions out there that try to solve it. Unfortunately they are solving it the only way possible, by using the current web standards of building stuff on top of more stuff.
rswail 11y ago
and this blog entry is a prime example, choosing a font that was small and faint against a bright background, making me click on my DFT firefox extension to override it. Worse is that there was absolutely no requirement for them to choose a small serif font for any particular web design reason.
- EdwardDiego 11y ago
  Small and faint? Looks fine to me? http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj
  - pmontra 11y ago
    Your image is 404. The text on the site is not black but it's 90% OK on my tablet (8" and about 2500x1600 px). Black text would probably be better. There is also a lot of useless () margin on the left but I can punch to zoom and make the text fill all the screen. No issues with font color at that size. () Useless because I want to read the text comfortably on the tablet. The screen of my computer is larger and I probably won't mind that margin there.
unabst 11y ago
Fonts are relatively small compared to media. Full screen top page images are only viewed once and mostly show nearly immediately on any decent connection, and are already several times larger than a web font or two used to style entire web sites. Full screen video is far worse in terms of bandwidth without user consent. And if you're on a shopping site or any site with photos, a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. We must not also forget that web fonts have replaced text graphics. They can be small, but when used on every header or with multiple states in interfaces, they added up quickly. Not only are web fonts lighter, they are real text. We don't want to revert to text graphics. What we have is the designer on one end, and the user on the other. The designer wants to decide how the page is served. The user wants to choose how they consume the page. Some users may add salt and pepper, or remove all the tomatoes. Giving users power cannot be a bad thing. But do we want features that automatically change our food no matter where we go? And there may be some allergic to everything. Maybe they'll turn off JS and not load any images, and be okay with half the sites being broken. But they will always be a minority that other's shouldn't be too concerned about. And they will always do whatever they want. To know if a web font is ugly requires tasting it first, so at that point, you've already paid for what you may have tried to save. But considering how little weight web fonts are and how important they can be as part of what is being expressed by the composer of a page, ignoring it would be like randomly removing an ingredient deemed important by the chef. Why risk those great sites for the one's that suck? Why would we allow the worst food to dictate all of our meals? Shouldn't we just call out bad web sites for what they are, instead of crippling our hard earned technology? Imagine iOS 9 with Arial. Fonts are important.
- huuu 11y ago
  There are two issues: The use of bad fonts The loading of fonts via third parties iOS did have a very bad font in the past but the font was embedded. With an OS you don't have to worry about a third party that might track you or serve you some infected font. Add blockers block those third party fonts. Personally I block all fonts via a Firefox setting because my dinner is served much faster and still tastes good (or better)
- kijin 11y ago
  > Fonts are relatively small compared to media ... a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. That may be true in the United States and Western Europe, where a typical font only needs to encode a hundred glyphs or so. But even Google webfonts begin to get rather hefty if you include Central European and Cyrillic characters. Things get even worse with CJK fonts that have (tens of) thousands of glyphs. I have yet to find a Korean webfont that comes in at less than a megabyte, and most common webfonts in my country take up several megabytes apiece. It's really annoying if you're on a metered connection, not to mention s-l-o-w to load. > We don't want to revert to text graphics. Of course we don't want to... but things are so bad in CJK-land that I once wrote a library [1] that automatically generates text graphics given a string and a font file. It creates a separate image for each word, reuses them where possible, and automatically adds alt-text for search engines and screen readers. So at least it's an improvement over old-fashioned text graphics. [1] https://github.com/kijin/imgtext https://github.com/kijin/imgtext
kmfrk 11y ago
As old as the web can feel at time, we are so blessed to have Georgia as one of the standard fonts. It is such a good serif font, which is also why I think a lot of the typography out there is more ornamental than necessary.
Simorgh 11y ago
As someone fascinated with web design, typography, UI and the like, it may be worthwhile to point out that design can markedly enhance the rate at which salient information is digested, the real bitrate, if you like. The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps not entirely scientific, but things like 'aura', 'emotion', 'atmosphere' and 'feel' can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing us to emote with others. Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here) than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is going on. Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset. That's because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the internet and remove all 'colour' would take away the beauty and the poetry of what the internet allows us to do.
benjiweber 11y ago
I have blacklisted google webfonts with hosts-file entry as many websites use fonts from there that are terrible. For instance open sans seems to be used more and more. Here's what it's like without antialiasing (top), vs Arial (bottom) http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png Antialiasing hides some of the terribleness but it is still much harder to read than alternatives.
steanne 11y ago
this is one part of why i love my rss reader.
alexweber 11y ago
Site was down when I tried to load it today. Here's a mirror via Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj.in%2Fblog%2F2015%2Fcollateral-damage https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj...

127 points by morisy 11y ago

ahoge 11y ago

As a NoScript user, I rarely see web fonts and I prefer it this way. The text shows up instantaneously and the font will look great and be perfectly readable. Most web fonts don't look that nice on Windows. Windows heavily relies on hinting and doing this properly is a lot of hard mind-numbing work. Most web fonts also aren't that readable. Sure, your wide/thin/square font looks very modern and stuff, but it's not as readable as a Verdana or Arial. When I visit your site, I'm there for the text, not the font.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
I'm there for the text, not the font Me too. In Firefox on OS X, I simply set Lucida Grande as my default font, and I uncheck the box that allows pages to choose their own fonts. I don't think I'm missing much.
- mrec 11y ago
  I did the same in FF/Win - web fonts were a huge step back in my opinion - but immediately discovered a bunch of sites (including GitHub) abusing web fonts for button images, which made them pretty much unusable. Have you found a selective workaround for this?
  - coffeedrinker 11y ago
    I use Chrome and a plugin called Font Changer that lets one override fonts on pages. I don't need to have it turned on for all sites but it can be done. Mostly I just have everything set to Arial (I don't like reading any serif fonts on screen). Perhaps there is a plugin for Firefox that does a similar thing.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    With uMatrix you can selectively enable various features for sites. I tend to start with minimal sets and re-enable to the point I've achieved sufficient functionality for my needs.
RexRollman 11y ago
I know you are specifically talking about web fonts but let's face it: a lot of the modern web sucks ass. I don't want my browser downloading custom fonts, autoplay videos, animated GIFs, or CSS elements that move around on their own (or refuse to move when I scroll). I am also not interested having my browser download javascript or tracking cookies from dozens of third party domains when I visit a site.
- gopowerranger 11y ago
  Your complaint is about design and how the site serves the page, not web fonts. Knowledgeable developers know how to deliver web fonts quickly and web fonts that looks good on your system. Unless you're paying by the byte, what gets downloaded shouldn't concern you from a well-developed site that doesn't hang on your phone. Unfortunately, in this copy/paste era, too many sites shoot themselves in the foot.
  - arbitrage 11y ago
    You, or anyone, don't get to tell people what concerns them. If they care about it, it's a concern. The cause of the concern should then be addressed, not the person having the concern.
    - gopowerranger 11y ago
      People are "concerned" about a lot of crazy things that shouldn't bother them.
      - narrowrail 11y ago
        This is good to have someone that defends these modern practices. My problem concerns NPR (i.e. npr.org) and their direction for the use of Drupal with a specific config for the sites for their local affiliates that often requires Google js for the site to function properly. Practically speaking, this will not impact most visitors, but most of these people are being pigeonholed without knowing it for advertising purposes. I have a big problem with this. It is now affecting non-technical people b/c of the use of (ad)blockers on iOS.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
snsr 11y ago
Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript. You are correct about Windows having objectively terrible font rendering though, and not just in web browsers.
- ahoge 11y ago
  > Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript. NoScript blocks fonts, video, audio, and JavaScript.

tcdent 11y ago

> "...if you’re a user, chances are, you’re quite relieved (or even ecstatic) at the ability to block web fonts and experience a faster web." These days, with increased processing power and standards adoption generally available, we really have been able to push the weight of websites. Conversely, battery powered devices and sketchy wideband internet access are growing rapidly. Sure, we have the power, but it's becoming apparent that at this scale effeciency is very important. More users than ever want more content faster than ever. Globalized (literally) asset sharing, with technologies like digest references in script and link tags could make a big difference. Why not even pre-package really popular stuff (jQuery, Helvetica, etc) with the browser or OS?

striking 11y ago
You may have forgotten that Helvetica licenses cost money. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Feel free to buy me one, I'm a starving designer :) Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
- radicalbyte 11y ago
  Buy? For the web it's worse - they nickel and dime you based on the number of visitors to your site. It's an subscription.
notatoad 11y ago
The popular stuff should be just as performant as if it were packaged with the browser - most sites are pulling jquery from one of the big CDNs and caching it for as long as possible. You aren't downloading jquery for every site that needs it, you're downloading it once for the thousands of sites that use the same cdn. Packaging it into the browser is just going to introduce a whole bunch of complexity around versioning and updates and standardization.

narsil 11y ago

As a user, I hope this pushes designers to consider the aesthetics of a page rendered in a font supported by the browser. Unlike JavaScript, a web page rarely needs a custom font to function, so designers must assume users would block custom fonts if preferable.

andyfleming 11y ago
Yeah, but in reality, designers may just turn back to static images to maintain a consistent appearance. That would force a step backwards.
- dragonne 11y ago
  Hopefully we can find a more pleasing medium. For example, if designers used web fonts with metrics that match common built-ins the FOUT could be made much less jarring. (Yes, ligatures and such make that difficult in the general case, but it surely could be good enough for headlines.)

andyfleming 11y ago

There are some interesting issues at play here. There is obviously some desire to have levels of standardized-form content that can be consumed in the way that the user desires. However, I disagree with a closed internet. Websites, like brick and mortar businesses, should be able to do what they want. They are responsible for the user's experience and should be able to craft it as they see fit. A browser (or extensions) should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may not want to experience the internet. (Ads in partciular, are a unique part of the discussion). I appreciate websites like medium, reddit, facebook, pinterest, and others that standardized content formats for users to experience in a consitent way. The "death of RSS" is related here too. It's a complex issue. With RSS the user has significantly more control, but the problem is that you lose context and it can often become hard to browse large amounts of content.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
Browser should let user choose which kind of experience they desire. Unfortunately, both websites AND web browsers are set on taking choices from users and forcing agenda on them.
- striking 11y ago
  Web browsers are becoming better at accommodating user choice, though. More and more browsers have extensions or content filtering tools, which are an extension of the user's power into their view of the web. And if there's a site that really forces its agenda on you, don't use it. If enough people agree that it's not useful enough to be worth the trouble, it'll stop existing eventually.
binarycrusader 11y ago
Sorry, but the idea that the client (browser) doesn't get to choose the experience is fundamentally incompatible with the architecture of the web. I don't see how you can call that a "closed" internet; quite the opposite. From the very beginning, almost every standard related to the web has made it very clear that ultimately clients get to choose what to display, what to retrieve, and how to display it. Yes, that freedom comes with a price, but it's a price worth paying. For users that are visually impaired, it's particularly important to be able to override the suggestions of the content being displayed. I don't see how there's an "agenda" involved in what any web browsers are doing today. The end user is the one choosing to use the client, choosing to use the content blocker, etc. If Apple or Google made the choice to start blocking content using the browser itself (on their own), you might have a point, but that hasn't happened (yet).

MattSteelblade 11y ago

I agree with the author on his main point, but his statement, "[w]ebsites should not come with minimum software requirements," only works in a perfect world. Unless it can be shown in ROI, there is no reason to develop for anything but a modern browser (I'm looking at you old versions of IE).

ddebernardy 11y ago
You might have the ROI question upside down. The overhead of developing for IE - even older ones - is small if you ignore bells and whistles. There are a few CSS gotchas to worry about and that's about it. A webpage shouldn't require megs of JS and assets and what have you to work. The real question is whether the time you spend on these bells and whistles contribute a positive ROI.
- tsotha 11y ago
  It might, for a commercial site. Flashy can sell, depending on the business.

dragonne 11y ago

While we're discussing problems with web fonts, let's not forget the other common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don't seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-issue HP laptop. Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there's always reader mode.

tcdent 11y ago
From a marketing perspective, we kept getting really excited seeing screen resolutions rise and font rendering improve for our audience. Now designers can just design, not "for-web", which used to be a very restrictive medium compared to what could be achieved with a pixel editor. We realize some strange folks somewhere are still running IE6, but they aren't the ones responding to our campaigns anyway.
- blub 11y ago
  Somewhere along the way designers forgot that design is not just about pretty things, but also being able to comfortably use the said things.
- xorcist 11y ago
  Or as they said ten years ago: "Did you know your web page is unreadable in Firefox?" "Yeah, but our analysis shows very few of our visitors use Firefox."
  - tcdent 11y ago
    But really, it's the only sane way. Sorry, my QA guy is not going to test with Konqueror just because you happen to like it.

analog31 11y ago

In my view, fonts are just another case of potential conflicting interests between content creators and content consumers. I can easily imagine wanting to override the fonts chosen by content creators, for instance if a vision impaired person wants to substitute a more readable font (or even let a text-to-speech program take over). Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my 9600 baud dial-up connection.

mrob 11y ago
I disable web fonts, because the most legible font is the font you're most used to reading. Fancy typography is the graphic design version of loudness war music mastering - something to gain attention and seem attractive in the short term, but unpleasant in the long term. In both cases there's a tragedy of the commons situation. People compete to stand out and make things worse for everybody. Blocking web fonts helps prevent this market failure.
- grey-area 11y ago
  Legibility is important, but it's not the only reason to choose a font. The form of words (font, colour, size, context) also helps tell you what they mean. I agree the reader should be able to override appearance when it suits them, but there's nothing bad about content creators using form as well as content to communicate. Feel free to block web fonts, but you should recognise you are losing something more important than mere decoration by doing so.
  - mrob 11y ago
    I agree that the form of the words can be a good way to convey information. That's why we have bold and italic. There's no need to change the entire font when you could use those standard variations of a familiar font. You're also losing something important (familiarity) by allowing designers to change fonts at will, and I argue that's a greater loss.
11y ago

striking 11y ago

This title doesn't accurately describe the content of the article. The author's argument is that web designers should be allowing default fonts while including @font-face fonts, and that Web Fonts had it coming. It also states that ad blockers are just an implementation of the idea of disabling crappy/slow web fonts. And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn't have to cURL your website or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends are cute, but there's nothing like actually being able to read a page. (and if you're using Canvas or something, I've already closed the tab.)

nitrogen 11y ago
Please make your website legible. I suspect a huge part of the legibility problems a lot of sites see is the gamma, DPI, and font rendering of the designer's system not matching their audience. A very thin font with gray-on-gray might look great on a calibrated 5K iMac with Safari, but be completely unreadable on Firefox for Windows on a standard 1080p screen with bad colors.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  I am guilty of only color calibrating my screens (mainly for contrast/gamma reasons, less for straight up color accuracy), and I do this so I get an accurate look at what contrast actually looks like. I have 3x Dell U2414H (absolutely fantastic monitors, if you can find any for sale still (discontinued recently), buy them all up), and display in newest stable Chrome, newest stable Firefox, MSIE11 in Windows with unadjusted ClearType settings (only MSIE11 listens to Cleartype settings, and basically destroys ultra-thin fonts if you adjust Cleartype, so, uh, just leave it alone, trust me), and then Safari on a retina MBP because Safari both has different (possibly better, possibly worse, clearly different) font rendering but also the fact it is on HiDPI increases the difference in how things are rendered on top of it just being Safari.... and if I don't like what I see in all four, then I fiddle with it until text is clearly readable. I'm okay with thin fonts, I actually adore them because they are easier to read on larger font sized text over thicker text, but please check it on a standard Windows non-HiDPI machine, especially if you're a Mac fanatic that loves Safari on a Retina Mac. Just do it.

conductr 11y ago

Seems like use of fonts isn't the issue, it's the fact they have to be served. Why can't browsers embed more fonts?

striking 11y ago
Fonts cost money to license. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
- unethical_ban 11y ago
  *Some fonts.
- mapt 11y ago
  It may not be in the spirit of the web, but the current state of things is a failure. Less of a failure than 10 years ago, but still a failure. Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a useful thing for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.
  - vacri 11y ago
    A gzipped truetype font is in the order of 100k, though plenty are bigger. 256 of these is ~25MB. Chrome and Firefox are only 45MB to begin with.
- kzrdude 11y ago
  It's supposed to be a decentralized network. Blocking all non-google or non-typekit webfonts is an example of breaking that vision for the web, which is a shame. I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.

MichaelGG 11y ago

What blockers/browsers should do is just tell scripts that they finished loading. Then sites would continue to work just fine. This kind of technique is gonna be needed to continue ad blocking once a lot of pages start trying to detect blockers and not display content.

zodiakzz 11y ago
That would start a needless arms race, there are a million ways to detect if you're using an ad blocker.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Ultimately winnable by the end user. It's DRM all over again. Worst case: An image recog system identifies and blanks out areas that are showing ads. (Or hell, a robot arm puts pieces of paper over the screen.) May as well start the arms race when we know who will finish it.
  - ansgri 11y ago
    re: a robot arm: websites will simply require to connect to a webcam showing you browsing the site to allow viewing. We'd better devise a way to painlessly charge users ¢0.1 per view.
    - LeoNatan25 11y ago
      ¢0.1 per clickbait.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      True. I suppose they could also serve up an ad-captcha before serving the content.

0xcde4c3db 11y ago

I don't block fonts to make my web experience faster, I block them to reduce my browser's attack surface on untrusted sites. Generally speaking, font-handling code is not exactly notorious for being well-hardened against attacker-controlled data.

kawera 11y ago

I love typography and have no issues with the fonts themselves; font servers are the problem here, making several requests to download not only fonts but also js scripts. We could easily see Google Fonts as Google Analytics in desguise, same for Adobe. Encoding fonts directly into stylesheets works pretty well.

radicalbyte 11y ago
Not really, the browser caches these files. They're only loaded once. No requests for subsequent usages. I don't see how that helps for spying on visitors? Google must be doing it to improve performance.
- kawera 11y ago
  Sure, I give Google the benefit of the doubt in regard to user data collection on GF. As for caching, mobile phones have very small caches and will reload fonts frequently, specially with the large variety of fonts available. And if the browser can cache font files it can also cache stylesheets with base64 encoded fonts, saving requests at the same time.
- EdwardDiego 11y ago
  > They're only loaded once. No requests for subsequent usages. Are you sure? Typically a <script> tag pointing to a cached script will still trigger a conditional GET.
  - radicalbyte 11y ago
    If you include an expiry date with a cache-control header then the server won't be contacted. I typically use this in combination with a unique suffix (for changes) for my web applications. It appears that google are not doing that, they are indeed using these scripts to track your users. Take jquery for example: Response: Remote Address:[2a00:1450:4009:80a::200a]:443 Request URL:https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js Request Method:GET Status Code:304 OK Response Headers: age:414824 alt-svc:quic=":443"; p="1"; ma=604800 alternate-protocol:443:quic,p=1 date:Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:17:51 GMT expires:Wed, 28 Sep 2016 15:17:51 GMT server:GFE/2.0 status:304

Animats 11y ago

You probably shouldn't be setting your body copy in a downloaded font. That feature is more suitable for display and heading fonts, which are usually much larger than fonts used for body copy. People used to put headings in as images, which is a pain for search engines, screen readers, and everything else that understands HTML.

equil 11y ago

I hope this entices developers to reconsider the use of private use area (PUA) [0] based icon fonts for key navigational elements. I see them used time and again, and a slow connection or spotty CDN can render these sites unusable. [1] If you absolutely have to use icon fonts, at least use ligatures instead of a PUA. That lets you fallback to a whole word if the specific font isn't present, or if the user relies on assistive technology like a screen reader. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas [1] http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png http://i.imgur.com/GR9Jk2b.png

gherkin0 11y ago
Me too. I blocked web fonts in Firefox because a lot of them rendered text like trash when I had font anti-aliasing/sub-pixel rendering disabled (I prefer blocky-crispness to blurry-smoothness). Those stupid icon fonts have been the collateral damage. And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?
- antod 11y ago
  > And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images? Some reasons: * They are scalable vector images without the download bloat and processing load of rendering them with SVG. * Raster icons need to closely match the screen DPI or they look awful - eg Retina displays made raster icons look like blocky pixellated afterthoughts. * They inherit colors, sizes etc from CSS the same way as their surrounding elements.
tombrossman 11y ago
Thanks for explaining the issue so clearly. I see this a lot after installing Privacy Badger and I wondered what it was called. In the rare instances that I needed one of these for page navigation, I've just hovered the mouse pointer over it and guessed at it's purpose by looking at the URL. It's one of those things that are an annoyance, but not quite a big enough issue to spend my time solving it or learning the cause.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Fuck your web fonts. Seriously, just fuck them to hell. I've been online since long before the World Wide Web was a thing, and I've watched the evolution of Web design from TBL's first proposals, through background wallpapers, animated flames, multicoloured layouts, spacing pixels and table-based layouts through to the saviours that were supposed to be CSS and AJAX. It's all been a terrible mistake. I'm leaning to a model in which a standard set of templates exist: article page, index, gallary, catalog, search -- and the client has a set of standard (or custom) templates to view them with. Client overrides server and author. Yes, this means putting all but three Web designers in the world out of work. Couldn't happen soon enough. A recent discovery of mine was that the combination of uMatrix and Stylish is fantastic. As the first blocks by default all CSS, fonts, and JS, I'm given a blank canvas from which I can apply my own preferred stylings (look up Edward Morbius's motherfucking Web page for a general taste). https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ Before this it was a stable of over 1800 local stylesheets, most quite brief and/or standard, to fix common gripes. And it's not just me. A visually disabled friend, totally blind in one eye, 20/60 vision at best with correction in the other, and generally not particularly computer literate, has endless frustrations with gimmicky websites with all the usual crap: low contrast, tiny font sizes, hard-to-read fonts, poor colour choices, content which re-renders multiple times,etc. I just spent an hour at the local Apple store exploring various accessibility options. While there are some for Mac and iOS products, they're terribly insufficient. No way to globally set user font sizes. No way to make "reader mode" the default for either Safari or Firefox. No alternative to mouse and icon interactions in far too many cases. And that's just the OS. The Web as a whole is many times worse. Readability Mode for the entire Web, with a small header space for branding, would be a huge improvement over the status quo.

36erhefg 11y ago
I mostly agree with you. The web itself is wholly incorrectly designed, or should I say evolved incorrectly. Instead of generic content that gets modified to individual users preference, we have the inverse, every site has some special functionality/code and therefore needs a web designer. This is not only increasing complexity, but also cost. With generic web, anyone could make a web page, no coding required, and anyone could read it. You can see that there is actual demand for this, as there are emerging solutions out there that try to solve it. Unfortunately they are solving it the only way possible, by using the current web standards of building stuff on top of more stuff.

rswail 11y ago

and this blog entry is a prime example, choosing a font that was small and faint against a bright background, making me click on my DFT firefox extension to override it. Worse is that there was absolutely no requirement for them to choose a small serif font for any particular web design reason.

EdwardDiego 11y ago
Small and faint? Looks fine to me? http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj http://imgur.com/g6Ue5Fj
- pmontra 11y ago
  Your image is 404. The text on the site is not black but it's 90% OK on my tablet (8" and about 2500x1600 px). Black text would probably be better. There is also a lot of useless () margin on the left but I can punch to zoom and make the text fill all the screen. No issues with font color at that size. () Useless because I want to read the text comfortably on the tablet. The screen of my computer is larger and I probably won't mind that margin there.

unabst 11y ago

Fonts are relatively small compared to media. Full screen top page images are only viewed once and mostly show nearly immediately on any decent connection, and are already several times larger than a web font or two used to style entire web sites. Full screen video is far worse in terms of bandwidth without user consent. And if you're on a shopping site or any site with photos, a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. We must not also forget that web fonts have replaced text graphics. They can be small, but when used on every header or with multiple states in interfaces, they added up quickly. Not only are web fonts lighter, they are real text. We don't want to revert to text graphics. What we have is the designer on one end, and the user on the other. The designer wants to decide how the page is served. The user wants to choose how they consume the page. Some users may add salt and pepper, or remove all the tomatoes. Giving users power cannot be a bad thing. But do we want features that automatically change our food no matter where we go? And there may be some allergic to everything. Maybe they'll turn off JS and not load any images, and be okay with half the sites being broken. But they will always be a minority that other's shouldn't be too concerned about. And they will always do whatever they want. To know if a web font is ugly requires tasting it first, so at that point, you've already paid for what you may have tried to save. But considering how little weight web fonts are and how important they can be as part of what is being expressed by the composer of a page, ignoring it would be like randomly removing an ingredient deemed important by the chef. Why risk those great sites for the one's that suck? Why would we allow the worst food to dictate all of our meals? Shouldn't we just call out bad web sites for what they are, instead of crippling our hard earned technology? Imagine iOS 9 with Arial. Fonts are important.

huuu 11y ago
There are two issues: The use of bad fonts The loading of fonts via third parties iOS did have a very bad font in the past but the font was embedded. With an OS you don't have to worry about a third party that might track you or serve you some infected font. Add blockers block those third party fonts. Personally I block all fonts via a Firefox setting because my dinner is served much faster and still tastes good (or better)
kijin 11y ago
> Fonts are relatively small compared to media ... a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all. That may be true in the United States and Western Europe, where a typical font only needs to encode a hundred glyphs or so. But even Google webfonts begin to get rather hefty if you include Central European and Cyrillic characters. Things get even worse with CJK fonts that have (tens of) thousands of glyphs. I have yet to find a Korean webfont that comes in at less than a megabyte, and most common webfonts in my country take up several megabytes apiece. It's really annoying if you're on a metered connection, not to mention s-l-o-w to load. > We don't want to revert to text graphics. Of course we don't want to... but things are so bad in CJK-land that I once wrote a library [1] that automatically generates text graphics given a string and a font file. It creates a separate image for each word, reuses them where possible, and automatically adds alt-text for search engines and screen readers. So at least it's an improvement over old-fashioned text graphics. [1] https://github.com/kijin/imgtext https://github.com/kijin/imgtext

kmfrk 11y ago

As old as the web can feel at time, we are so blessed to have Georgia as one of the standard fonts. It is such a good serif font, which is also why I think a lot of the typography out there is more ornamental than necessary.

Simorgh 11y ago

As someone fascinated with web design, typography, UI and the like, it may be worthwhile to point out that design can markedly enhance the rate at which salient information is digested, the real bitrate, if you like. The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps not entirely scientific, but things like 'aura', 'emotion', 'atmosphere' and 'feel' can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing us to emote with others. Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here) than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is going on. Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset. That's because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the internet and remove all 'colour' would take away the beauty and the poetry of what the internet allows us to do.

benjiweber 11y ago

I have blacklisted google webfonts with hosts-file entry as many websites use fonts from there that are terrible. For instance open sans seems to be used more and more. Here's what it's like without antialiasing (top), vs Arial (bottom) http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png Antialiasing hides some of the terribleness but it is still much harder to read than alternatives.

steanne 11y ago

this is one part of why i love my rss reader.

alexweber 11y ago

Site was down when I tried to load it today. Here's a mirror via Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj.in%2Fblog%2F2015%2Fcollateral-damage https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:miranj...