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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

by 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

by unabst 11y ago

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