7 ms·

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files. or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif"

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files. or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif" or "sans-serif" to let an appropriate typeface be used if your third-party font is unreachable. That's the beauty of text, the content should still be readable even if your desired font is unavailable.

TheRealPomax 7y ago
Google Web Fonts are not an "or", here. Fonts have disappeared from it, and there is no reason to not expect Google to, at some point in the future, go: "you know what, this costs too much without any substantial return." And now it's just another killedbygoogle.com product. Just like images, self-hosting woff/woff2 should be step 1.
- shapov 7y ago
  Fonts disappearing is not a big issue that will ultimately render your page useless. If the font is gone, the look of the page is slightly affected, but the content of the page remains. It's honestly not a big deal at all.
  - account42 7y ago
    In that case just use sans-serif or a web-safe font and avoid the third-party dependency.
    - strenholme 7y ago
      Here as we enter the 2020s, there are no longer any web safe fonts. Those 1990s Core Fonts for the Web (Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, etc.) are no longer universal across all widely used platforms.
      - IggleSniggle 7y ago
        Yeah okay, but the initial suggestion (just specify "sans serif") still holds. Or really, if we're talking about a webpage to last, why do we even care about what font is being used? If you care enough about a font that the glyphs used are important for layout, then obviously you're going to need to include the font. If the specific look of the page is essential to the content conveyed, it seems likely to me you won't be using a standard font anyway. For typical "the words matter more than how the words look" content...can someone explain to me why we care about including the font?
        strenholme 7y ago
        There is another thread in this discussion where we discuss this, pointing out that default fonts in browsers tend to be quite ugly. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841011 There’s also layout issues caused when replacing a font with another font, unless the metrics are precisely duplicated. There’s a reason RedHat paid a lot of money to have Liberation Sans with the exact same metrics as Arial, Liberation Serif have the same metrics as Times New Roman, and Liberation Mono have the same metrics as Courier New.
- zo1 7y ago
  His "or" was to suggest that instead of only self-hosting the font file, you simply use a google one with a "fall-back" that happens to be a super-standard font that won't reasonably disappear from most OSes in the near future. That way, you get a reasonable "best of both".
joppy 7y ago
Google web fonts were a great way to make my site slower. I don’t know if it’s the latency here in Australia or what, but (especially for developing locally) google web fonts were a big headache for having snappy webpages. I took the time one day to produce my own webfont files and self-host those, and the difference in site load speed is like night and day.
- inimino 7y ago
  And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Actually Google Analytics works fine in PRC. Google Fonts also isn’t blocked but I recall it being hit-and-miss in terms of responsiveness when I was working on a website that targeted Chinese audience a few years ago. However, I just tried resolving fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on a Chinese server of mine, and they both resolve to a couple of Beijing IP addresses belonging to AS24424 Beijing Gu Xiang Information Technology Co. Ltd., so it’s probably very much usable now.
    - catherd 7y ago
      Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related. I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.
      - inimino 7y ago
        Yes, any additional domain you request to has a non-negligible chance of killing the entire connection. To GP, noticing that one request works once from a server (not a home or mobile connection) really means nothing. Every ISP has different and constantly changing failure modes.
ryandrake 7y ago
Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  The trouble is that the defaults tend not to be the best fonts that are available, and very few users change them. I have changed them myself, but I don’t know of anyone else that has. For myself, I wish that people would leave Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, &c. out of their sans-serif stack, having only their one preferred font and sans-serif, or better still sans-serif alone; but as a developer I understand exactly why they do it all.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Unfortunately, I'm one of those developers :( My font stack is: font-family: system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif; for prose and font-family: ui-monospaced, Menlo, monospace; for monospaced text. The first being the user's preferred font, the second as a good (IMO?) default that I impose on them, and the third as a full fallback. I'm conflicted on whether this is the right balance between user choice and handling browsers that support nothing.
- notatoad 7y ago
  It would be great if web browsers had a way to actually indicate the user's preference of typeface, but what we've actually got is the browser's preference, and the browsers almost all have chosen really terrible default typefaces. It's fine to say "just use the default" for Mac users who get a decent default, but then the poor windows users have to suffer through some terrible serif. The users who actually know how to change the default font also know how to use stylish.
- hashmal 7y ago
  When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you. Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd. Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Google Web Fonts are not an "or", here. Fonts have disappeared from it, and there is no reason to not expect Google to, at some point in the future, go: "you know what, this costs too much without any substantial return." And now it's just another killedbygoogle.com product. Just like images, self-hosting woff/woff2 should be step 1.

shapov 7y ago
Fonts disappearing is not a big issue that will ultimately render your page useless. If the font is gone, the look of the page is slightly affected, but the content of the page remains. It's honestly not a big deal at all.
- account42 7y ago
  In that case just use sans-serif or a web-safe font and avoid the third-party dependency.
  - strenholme 7y ago
    Here as we enter the 2020s, there are no longer any web safe fonts. Those 1990s Core Fonts for the Web (Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, etc.) are no longer universal across all widely used platforms.
    - IggleSniggle 7y ago
      Yeah okay, but the initial suggestion (just specify "sans serif") still holds. Or really, if we're talking about a webpage to last, why do we even care about what font is being used? If you care enough about a font that the glyphs used are important for layout, then obviously you're going to need to include the font. If the specific look of the page is essential to the content conveyed, it seems likely to me you won't be using a standard font anyway. For typical "the words matter more than how the words look" content...can someone explain to me why we care about including the font?
      - strenholme 7y ago
        There is another thread in this discussion where we discuss this, pointing out that default fonts in browsers tend to be quite ugly. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841011 There’s also layout issues caused when replacing a font with another font, unless the metrics are precisely duplicated. There’s a reason RedHat paid a lot of money to have Liberation Sans with the exact same metrics as Arial, Liberation Serif have the same metrics as Times New Roman, and Liberation Mono have the same metrics as Courier New.
zo1 7y ago
His "or" was to suggest that instead of only self-hosting the font file, you simply use a google one with a "fall-back" that happens to be a super-standard font that won't reasonably disappear from most OSes in the near future. That way, you get a reasonable "best of both".

joppy 7y ago

Google web fonts were a great way to make my site slower. I don’t know if it’s the latency here in Australia or what, but (especially for developing locally) google web fonts were a big headache for having snappy webpages. I took the time one day to produce my own webfont files and self-host those, and the difference in site load speed is like night and day.

inimino 7y ago
And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).
- oefrha 7y ago
  Actually Google Analytics works fine in PRC. Google Fonts also isn’t blocked but I recall it being hit-and-miss in terms of responsiveness when I was working on a website that targeted Chinese audience a few years ago. However, I just tried resolving fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on a Chinese server of mine, and they both resolve to a couple of Beijing IP addresses belonging to AS24424 Beijing Gu Xiang Information Technology Co. Ltd., so it’s probably very much usable now.
  - catherd 7y ago
    Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related. I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.
    - inimino 7y ago
      Yes, any additional domain you request to has a non-negligible chance of killing the entire connection. To GP, noticing that one request works once from a server (not a home or mobile connection) really means nothing. Every ISP has different and constantly changing failure modes.

ryandrake 7y ago

Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?

chrismorgan 7y ago
The trouble is that the defaults tend not to be the best fonts that are available, and very few users change them. I have changed them myself, but I don’t know of anyone else that has. For myself, I wish that people would leave Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, &c. out of their sans-serif stack, having only their one preferred font and sans-serif, or better still sans-serif alone; but as a developer I understand exactly why they do it all.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Unfortunately, I'm one of those developers :( My font stack is: font-family: system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif; for prose and font-family: ui-monospaced, Menlo, monospace; for monospaced text. The first being the user's preferred font, the second as a good (IMO?) default that I impose on them, and the third as a full fallback. I'm conflicted on whether this is the right balance between user choice and handling browsers that support nothing.
notatoad 7y ago
It would be great if web browsers had a way to actually indicate the user's preference of typeface, but what we've actually got is the browser's preference, and the browsers almost all have chosen really terrible default typefaces. It's fine to say "just use the default" for Mac users who get a decent default, but then the poor windows users have to suffer through some terrible serif. The users who actually know how to change the default font also know how to use stylish.
hashmal 7y ago
When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you. Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd. Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.