3 ms·
I like sites to be readable, quickly, and without leaking too much information to third parties. 'Beautiful' Web fonts tilt against all of those metrics.
by DamonHD 3y ago
I like sites to be readable, quickly, and without leaking too much information to third parties. 'Beautiful' Web fonts tilt against all of those metrics.
- LPavearoadi 3y agoDisagree. Helvetica.
- DamonHD 3y agoI don't know whether you are claiming that Helvetica is beautiful or not! In any case I think that it is available in most browsers locally, with a fall back to sans-serif easy if not? I haven't looked lately. I value locality and speed with a font that has been picked to work nicely for the browser without trying to wrestle every pixel. (Yes, I have been an editor, but I try to pick the readability battle first.)
- LPavearoadi 3y agoI was, yes. I think it's one of the most beautiful ever. It's so readable, both in print and digitally. https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica It was once widely available on OS/browser, but is increasingly not. It's not on Win 11 or the latest Chrome, for example. I glossed over your performance criteria, however; shame on me.
- nicbou 3y agoI self-host fonts. They’re around 45kb in total. It’s worth it.
- DamonHD 3y agoThat sounds pretty good. I'll think harder about where I should consider doing the same! But if you are self hosting then it ain't a "Web" font IMHO, and you contain the time/latency and page-weight cost, and probably eliminate the data leakage.
- stephenr 3y agoWeb fonts are just fonts downloaded on-demand by the browser based on css rules. Hosting the font file(s) on your own domain doesn't suddenly make them not webfonts.
- nicbou 3y agoIt's a Google font, just without Google infrastructure. The trick is to download a subset of the font, to use preloading, and if possible early hints. Then you barely know that it's there.