Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web fonts, boy, I don't know

meowni.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 333 posts

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#211

Post by Retra »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #60

All web developers should be forced to spend a full week using their site on each of LTE, 3g, and 2g. If your website takes more than 10 seconds to load on an ad-block free LTE device you're fired. Relevant: Page Weight Matters (2012) http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

There is absolutely nothing forcing people to use the internet through their phones, so I see no reason to force developers to optimize for it.

Some people eat their food through a tube, but you wouldn't force every cook to prepare all of their food to be eaten through a straw. And there you at least have a moral argument.

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#212

Post by adambrenecki »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #129

Yes, web fonts often suck on slow connections. Meanwhile, on fast-ish connections, I find the FOUC effect to be greatly annoying. That 1-2 seconds of seeing Times and Helvetica and then seeing Freight Text Pro and Proxima Nova drives me bonkers. I think there must be some kind of happy medium between FOUC for faster connections and rage-inducing FOIC for slow connections. Unfortunately, most devs (and sadly I claim t…

I think the Chrome behaviour (display invisible content for a while, then after a timeout render using fallback fonts) would be a happy compromise were the timeout not three whole seconds.

font-display: optional and font-display: fallback (as linked in the article) look like promising solutions to the problem (both recommend a FOIC aka 'block period' of 100ms), but it'd be even nicer to set the exact duration of the block and swap periods in CSS.

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#213

Post by lmm »

zzzcpan wrote: post #153
zeveb wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s. It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row. There's nothing wrong with that.

> It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row Presumably, that's why they used 80 characters in the first place, as anything more is too hard to read.

It was 80 columns to match a punch card, AIUI, not a decision on readability grounds at all.

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#214

Post by jccalhoun »

Nadya wrote: post #180
scholia wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be feasible to have an "enhancement pack" website where less talented people (ie me) could get fixes like this. I remember doing stuff like this with Proxomitron in the good old days....

>Would it be feasible to have an "enhancement pack" website where less talented people (ie me) could get fixes like this. Sort of? At least if I'm understanding you properly. :) It used to be that userscripts.org was a thing. Now I think you need to use a mirror [0]. There is also a subreddit for them [1]. Stylish should have a similar site for themes - although not all userscripts will work properly with Stylish (st…

Greasyfork is the replacement for userscripts https://greasyfork.org/en

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#215

Post by voltagex_ »

takeda wrote: post #64
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize sometimes it's okay to have a page larger than, say, 50kb. Right? The gifs were a great way to show the exact issues she was discussing and they take up the bulk of that space. So why is that a bad thing in any way? Yes web pages should, ideally , be small but that doesn't mean the media they show to the user has to be small as well.

It's very wasteful. Here's example what you could do with less than 200kb: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 If you don't want to run it on your computer, you can watch recording from youtube.

>at its heart this is still the werkkzeug3/kkrieger engine, except with a new(*) lighting/material system.

And how many hours went into creating something like that? Do you think people would pay for the equivalent amount of hours for websites to be crafted like that?

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#216

Post by godshatter »

wfunction wrote: post #160
cperciva wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!" This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but rather when I load reddit on my phone, a "get the reddit app" banner appears... timed perfectly so that my attempt to view my messages sends me off to the app store.

Same thing with the Facebook app; whenever you're searching for something, it shows the result you want, but then like 0.5-1 second later it pops up a different result above it so you tap the wrong thing. Drives me insane.

I get around this by not going to Facebook except when a relative or friend dies or the zombie apocalypse starts.

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#217

Post by tribby »

it's easy enough to edit web fonts to include only necessary characters, but most EULAs won't allow for this. any font licensed under the SIL open font license is fine, though you may have to change the font's name if it has a reserved font name (check the license file). this makes a huge difference (fonts under 10k), but no one ever bothers to do it. not sure if inlining them as base64 in your CSS and serving with gzip would help much more.

a lot of the stuff that we do in font editors is going to start happening in-browser. variable fonts that use two masters (the thinnest and heaviest font weights) to interpolate all the other weights in-browser are an emerging standard that will get font sizes down[0]. you're essentially being sent two fonts over the wire that can generate quite a few more. font files are bloated in a number of ways. eventually we'll have a standard where diacritics like ¨´ etc can automatically be added to letters without the need for an entirely separate glyph. (å,a,á,ä, are currently separate, which is very expensive).

google, adobe, and other big players are hard at work on this stuff, and it won't be long. there are pain points now, for sure, but to me this isn't an argument in favor of system fonts. most of web design is typography design, and anyone who says otherwise probably hasn't been designing for the web very long.

0. http://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new-kind...

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#218

Post by mcbits »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #202

I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks. 'Progressive styling' is way more annoying (in my humble opinion) than waiting some time. Pages like the verge can take minutes anyway, when the wifi is not optimal. When you do things progressively, the page just keeps on changing, and the page can't really be used.…

The shifting page layout is a symptom of a broader problem, in that it's impossible to accurately predict or specify the rendered dimensions of text. Even measuring a container after the fact is unreliable because of the arbitrary amount of whitespace in different fonts. You'd have to generate a bitmap image and detect a bounding box around the pixels, which definitely won't help with loading times. This can't be done at development time because different browsers and system configurations all render the same fonts slightly differently. So, even sticking with system fonts to avoid this one symptom, we have this giant elephant in the room making it difficult to ensure anything but the most primitive layouts will be legible across devices.

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#219

Post by discreditable »

mos_basik wrote: post #208
discreditable wrote: post #6

My feeling on web fonts is that that they can sometimes look nice but aren't worth the page weight. My approach is to pick two fonts I expect MacOS and Windows to have, then fall back to generic. Other times, I'm more lazy and just use the generic. To put it more bluntly: https://bestmotherfucking.website/#remote-fonts

>that link Nice. I was only familiar with the original one; I wasn't aware that there were more. It appears to be the most recent one? I was hoping to find a comprehensive list of this kind of site somewhere but didn't. I did find these by following some breadcrumbs: 1. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ [original] 2. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ 3. http://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ 4. https://bestmothe…

Thanks, I really appreciate the positive review!

Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know

#220

Post by jamesdelaneyie »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #202

I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks. 'Progressive styling' is way more annoying (in my humble opinion) than waiting some time. Pages like the verge can take minutes anyway, when the wifi is not optimal. When you do things progressively, the page just keeps on changing, and the page can't really be used.…

>I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.

I suppose some people are happy with color: red, while others like a bit more variety and opt for color: #a82a33.

Post reply on HN