As she's in Taiwan, she might have mentioned that webfonts, despite any pros and cons they have for western language sites, will never (never say "never"...) be useful for Chinese or Japanese sites. A bit off the topic of the article but maybe adds some perspective. Or not.
Web fonts, boy, I don't know
231–240 of 333 posts
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#232The HN crowd frequently compliments Stripe on their good looking, functional, well designed web pages. The Stripe home page is 75% web fonts (432k).
To be fair, 500k, at least compared to some webpages, is actually a fairly small size. This isn't really a case where a percent of the total is useful.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#233For web fonts in emails, look no further than my latest package `custom-fonts-in-emails` for Node.js.
https://github.com/crocodilejs/custom-fonts-in-emails#custom...
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#234I blame the browsers. There's no deep reason you have to introduce a piece of javascript to hide stuff from the browser so that it can load the page normally, and then add back the fonts. If browsers cared about making the web usable for everybody more than they cared about making web page look like slick native apps, they'd do it for you.
The way browser internals work is already designed for that. if the network is slow and you get only half the html, half the css, miss some images, or whatever, the browser will render as best as it can with what it got so far, and re-render when it gets the rest. The fact that it doesn't do that with fonts sucks.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#235I think the easiest solution would be just not to use web fonts at all. Do you need fancy fonts on a website with technical documentation? I think you don't but sadly PHP developers added a whole megabyte of fonts to PHP manual. As a result one has to wait until the fonts are loaded to see the text. And web fonts are often poorly rendered on Windows. I want an option in Chromium that would allow disabling web fonts b…
> I think the easiest solution would be just not to use web fonts at all. Here's another option: plain text. That's right. You can have webpages that are plain text without any HTML formatting, and they will render. Here is an example file: This is text. This is the absolute best way of presenting web content. No one will complain.
The difference between web fonts and HTML/CSS is that HTML loads progressively and markup doesn't weight more than all other resources. So I am ok with both plain text and HTML pages but not ok with fonts until browser vendors make a better implementation and make them optional.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I believe font matters, I really think people should just use system fonts in general. No content is definitely more annoying than ugly content, but I have a seething hatred for webpages who jump around as content loads. "Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!" Besides, I'm used to my fonts. I know your fonts are a deliberate design choice, but I'm…
Using system fonts becomes a minefield once you realise they tend to be unique to each platform.
Depends on whether you want to display information or show off design.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#237Ehhh. Slowness has its benefits. But you need to know the fallout that will result.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#238Earlier 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. As a profession, we can't complain that someone might be bothered by the idea of word-wrapping.
> 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.
Not only is 80char more readable, as a sibling comment said, but it also allows addition pieces of code to be displayed side-by-side on a laptop screen.
To be fair, 120char wide code is also not too bad for this purpose and readability.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is misleading and seems mean spirited to me. On a fresh page load with cache disabled, I'm reading 165kb transferred. The GIFs are useful and lazily loaded in response to user interactions. "Be more constructive with your feedback!"[1] 1: https://youtu.be/FArZxLj6DLk?t=88
The page was 1.2MB with the animated gifs on page with tags when this was originally posted. The page has since been optimized.
The page has been on the treadmill and cut out the carbs.
Re: Web fonts, boy, I don't know
#240I'm regularly annoyed by the flash when loading the Docker documentation, e.g. http://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/ It's annoying enough to warrant using Stylish to override the web font.
Is this because of the web fonts or because of markdown rendering?