4 ms·

That doesn't sound right. There are a variety of CDNs out there for things like javascript libraries that aren't available for you to use for your own content.

• peterwwillis 13y ago
  That definition sounds overly broad, but i'm having trouble disproving it. I think I figured out how to describe why it sounds weird in this case. When you use a car, you're usually driving on public roads. But you don't say "hey honey, would you like to use the road to get some chinese food?" because the application you (the user) are using directly is not the road, it's the car. The car just happens to use the road as a means of interconnection from home to the chinese takeout place. There can be many kinds of distributed systems of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet to serve content to end-users. But often these serve other functions besides just distributing content. The underlying principle of a CDN is that it just moves content around, regardless of what it is. With Google Fonts, you aren't using a tool to move content around. You're using an API to control an application that manipulates fonts. It just happens to be running on a network that distributes the content around in the background. Google Fonts uses a CDN to give you content, but it's far more complex than a typical CDN, and your use of it is merely to distribute content, but to specifically access and manipulate fonts.