4 ms·

Yeah, no. Until the standards give us more fonts with better metrics (like a guarantee that a default sans, serif and fixed-width fonts come from the same famil

by yoz-y 5y ago

Yeah, no. Until the standards give us more fonts with better metrics (like a guarantee that a default sans, serif and fixed-width fonts come from the same family), the default fonts will look quite crummy. I wish there was some font cache that could be shared between all sites, so once you downloaded a font it would be available for all. But I guess due to copyright it will never happen.

manigandham 5y ago
That font cache is just using 3rd-party hosted fonts like Google Fonts.
- Zardoz84 5y ago
  if you read the article, you will know that it works anymore like a "font cache".
  - Zardoz84 5y ago
    *don't work anymore
    - leephillips 5y ago
      *doesn’t work anymore
swiley 5y ago
Meh. I'll take "looking crummy" over waiting 30 seconds to read someone's ad-filled essay on whatever.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Fonts are 20 kb each. Even on the slowest of mobile connections, they hardly make a difference. If you're waiting 30 seconds, fonts are not the bottleneck.
  - maccard 5y ago
    If you have a few fonts, referenced by an external css file, on a page that has a bunch of images, the delay is a couple of seconds on a mobile connection. It's not just the download time for 20kb, it's the servers response time (you _are_ hosting it yourself right?) × number of resources requested. I'd rather just view the page with the default fonts rather than wait 5-6 secondsfor the minimally different sans serif font that you've chosen for one paragraph that blocks the entire page render.
    - nicbou 5y ago
      Even on the absolute slowest connection, it takes less than that for my 4 font variants to load.
  - swiley 5y ago
    You might be able to load the fonts quickly on their own but if they're requested by something else that's dynamically loaded the (serialized) round trips can add up fast, especially on high latency connections like satellite.
    - nicbou 5y ago
      "But think of the satellite connections" isn't really a meaningful consideration in a world where we don't support IE and most websites are megabytes in side. Mine is fast enough for people stuck in the underground, which is a far more significant demographic for me. Hypotheticals aside, the fonts load sufficiently fast in a single round trip (two if HTTP2 push isn't supported), and do not block rendering.
subsection1h 5y ago
First, my default fonts look great because I chose them and my preferences are superior to everyone else's. Second, I use Debian and I have a fonts.conf that's hundreds of lines long, including dozens of lines of hinting settings because I prefer that some fonts use hintfull and others use hintslight. I don't have hinting settings for every font that exists, only fonts I installed, so when a site uses a web font, there is no dedicated hinting setting for it in my fonts.conf, and so it almost always looks worse than my default font.
- majewsky 5y ago
  That's cool, but you do realize you're the 0.001%, right?

by yoz-y 5y ago

manigandham 5y ago

That font cache is just using 3rd-party hosted fonts like Google Fonts.

Zardoz84 5y ago
if you read the article, you will know that it works anymore like a "font cache".
- Zardoz84 5y ago
  *don't work anymore
  - leephillips 5y ago
    *doesn’t work anymore

swiley 5y ago

Meh. I'll take "looking crummy" over waiting 30 seconds to read someone's ad-filled essay on whatever.

nicbou 5y ago
Fonts are 20 kb each. Even on the slowest of mobile connections, they hardly make a difference. If you're waiting 30 seconds, fonts are not the bottleneck.
- maccard 5y ago
  If you have a few fonts, referenced by an external css file, on a page that has a bunch of images, the delay is a couple of seconds on a mobile connection. It's not just the download time for 20kb, it's the servers response time (you _are_ hosting it yourself right?) × number of resources requested. I'd rather just view the page with the default fonts rather than wait 5-6 secondsfor the minimally different sans serif font that you've chosen for one paragraph that blocks the entire page render.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    Even on the absolute slowest connection, it takes less than that for my 4 font variants to load.
- swiley 5y ago
  You might be able to load the fonts quickly on their own but if they're requested by something else that's dynamically loaded the (serialized) round trips can add up fast, especially on high latency connections like satellite.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    "But think of the satellite connections" isn't really a meaningful consideration in a world where we don't support IE and most websites are megabytes in side. Mine is fast enough for people stuck in the underground, which is a far more significant demographic for me. Hypotheticals aside, the fonts load sufficiently fast in a single round trip (two if HTTP2 push isn't supported), and do not block rendering.

subsection1h 5y ago

First, my default fonts look great because I chose them and my preferences are superior to everyone else's. Second, I use Debian and I have a fonts.conf that's hundreds of lines long, including dozens of lines of hinting settings because I prefer that some fonts use hintfull and others use hintslight. I don't have hinting settings for every font that exists, only fonts I installed, so when a site uses a web font, there is no dedicated hinting setting for it in my fonts.conf, and so it almost always looks worse than my default font.

majewsky 5y ago
That's cool, but you do realize you're the 0.001%, right?