5 ms·
MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently. We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and th
by matteason 4y ago
MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently.
We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and they track that via an @import in the CSS they give you which points to a URL on a subdomain of myfonts.net. Except they changed their licensing mechanism, didn't tell their customers and broke the subdomain the @import was hitting. It didn't fail immediately, just kept trying to load for ages, and so rendering was blocked and our pages didn't load. That was pretty frustrating.
- KronisLV 4y agoWouldn't some of the font-display options be helpful for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/font-display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Here's some more information: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/
- bastawhiz 4y agoNo. It's not about the font loading, it's about the CSS import loading.
- tonetheman 4y ago[dead]
- johnchristopher 4y agoThis is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.
- lozenge 4y agoIt wasn't missing, it was slow. Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.
- petefromnorth 4y agoYes, better a fallback than to completely block.
- jen20 4y agoThis kind of thing is why I block all web fonts. I don't want to wait, and I don't want the page to reflow while I'm reading it. The best way to do that is to use the system fonts (which also happen to be nice, on a Mac).
- manuelmoreale 4y agoThis is why—if I can—I design my sites using OS fonts that are honestly quite good.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago> Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? It makes me angry that this is even a sentence. Call me an old fart but I really felt that the web lost the thread when this became a concern. Websites shouldn't be magazines. Typography and layouts are nice to have, but the first priority should be information and content. But then the marketing people got involved and it had to become part of the "brand experience". Just give me a HTML table with your menu items, description, and prices. Or even better just the data in an XML file and I can read it without JavaScript and animations and awkward navigation patterns. <returns to defending his front lawn>
- makeitdouble 4y ago> Websites shouldn't be magazines. Why though? We’re in 2023 and magazines got out of print to move to the web. Telling literal magazines “no, you shouldn’t exist here” is pretty harsh. But I’ll grant you the mental image is powerful. I imagine you going to a restaurant and shouting “what’s with the decorum ? And that background music ? and all this space between tables ? this should be a warehouse with everyone sitting on the floor with the lasagna served in tupperwares ”
- formerly_proven 4y agoThis sounds like the awkward middle. You're "too professional" to use system or OFL fonts, so you need to license a commercial font. Yet you're too small to just outright buy the perpetual license or have your own customized font (like most bigger companies have). So you end up with checks notes a pay-per-view font and all the issues associated with that. Which in turn gave you a rather unprofessionally broken website.
- j45 4y agoInteresting. I wonder if a cache like cloudflare could have reduced those impressions.
- berry_sortoro 4y ago[dead]
- themodelplumber 4y agoUhhh. What? When was this? That's weird to hear about, because I use them on a variety of monitored sites and haven't encountered any issues.