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Web fonts, boy, I don't know

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

#311

Post by Animats »

Klathmon wrote: post #139
Animats wrote: post #2

Fonts ought to have Subresource Integrity checksums, and clients should cache them effectively, even cross-site. It's not like they change much.

This has been tried and failed many times in the past with other things. The biggest problems are with what a "canonical" version actually is, and security. Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues. The big one for fonts is that you very rarely include a WH…

Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues.

Oh? We have browsers eating a gigabyte of RAM now.

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

#312

Post by Klathmon »

Animats wrote: post #311
Klathmon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been tried and failed many times in the past with other things. The biggest problems are with what a "canonical" version actually is, and security. Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues. The big one for fonts is that you very rarely include a WH…

Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues. Oh? We have browsers eating a gigabyte of RAM now.

Which has nothing to do with cache sizes.

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

#313

Post by et-al »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #298
et-al wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium. That seems a bit harsh. If anything, I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts. Speakers[0] at An Event Apart spoke of the web as a fluid continuum, so even the idea of designing for only mobile and des…

Still doesn't solve the bigger problem - that neither designers nor publishers actually embraced the digital medium. They've been treating the web as if it was a poster - something for the designers to show off on. The only thing the current "responsive design" fad brought up is that the poster now changes its layout with size in a somewhat intelligent manner. But they're still drawing posters. We're still getting on…

That's because up until recently, the only tools users have to interact have been 2D. If 3D becomes a thing, more designers will embrace it and think of new ways to communicate ideas in that space.

Also, in a discussion about communicating efficiently over limited bandwidth, and the possibility removing web fonts, 3D spaces is in a completely opposite direction. We'd have to load vector files and texture maps so that the 3D space doesn't look like crap.

Also, there's a limit to how much input a human can process. There's a reason why certain sites have gotten more simple to restrict distractions.

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

#314

Post by DeadBabyOrgasm »

marblar wrote: post #110
eterm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which will lead to the same hack as paywalled news sites, the ads won't load when referred from google meanwhile the rest will suffer.

So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...

Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.

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

#315

Post by DeadBabyOrgasm »

paublyrne wrote: post #147
wruza wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser vendors against adclicks, mice against cheese, bees against honey, what you gonna do now?

Mice aren't really interested in cheese.

Exactly. They're masters of subtlety, manipulating our species to evolve in just the right way, learn just the right things. We don't experiment on them so much as they experiment on us.

Masters of subtlety...

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

#316

Post by [deleted] »

mbrock wrote: post #268
erikpukinskis wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly my point. You are unwilling to accept the properties of your medium. You just say "it sucks" and fight with it. You're like an acrylic painter who complains that oil dries slowly and keeps designing for acrylics, and everything comes out smudgy.

Web fonts are a part of the web, so it kind of sounds like you're the one refusing to accept the properties of the medium.

[deleted]

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

#317

Post by wallacoloo »

tmnvix wrote: post #280
wallacoloo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it could at least be mitigated on the browser's side though: "This text was at the top of the viewport before the restyling, so let's scroll the document to the point where that text still appears at the top."

The text in column 1, 2, or 3? Or perhaps you were reading the text in the footer at the time that the page decided to slap on its makeup?

Yeah, so it clearly can't solve everything, hence "mitigate" instead of e.g. "completely solve". In any case, I'd argue that 90% of the time it's better than doing nothing at all.

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

#318

Post by yellowapple »

et-al wrote: post #264
erikpukinskis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium. They'll sit lovingly with a bunch of dinged up old lead typesetting tools, positively jizz over imperfections in ink distribution, but try to talk to them about system fonts, box models, or free phones and their eyes glaze over and they drift off into their color calibrated RAW dreamland. In schools t…

> This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium. That seems a bit harsh. If anything, I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts. Speakers[0] at An Event Apart spoke of the web as a fluid continuum, so even the idea of designing for only mobile and des…

"I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts."

I want to believe you, but I feel like the sheer number of designers who whine about GIMP's lack of CMYK support in their justifications for using Photoshop instead (nevermind that pretty much all modern display technology is RGB-centric) suggests otherwise.

I can understand thinking in a CMYK mindset and not wanting to have to think about RGB, but that nonetheless suggests an unwillingness to change one's mindset to adapt to current media.

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

#319

Post by yellowapple »

hyperpape wrote: post #138
jimktrains2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? > Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts. This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're…

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.

I'm one of those people, though my reason is more so that I can fit more code windows side-by-side (especially on a system with a tiling window manager, like the laptop on which I'm typing this comment) and not have to deal with horizontal scrolling or weird word wrapping that's out of my control.

It also helps to keep my code readable; the shorter the line, the quicker I can work out what exactly that line happens to do. In the vast majority of cases, an inability to keep a line within 72 characters is a line that needs refactored.

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

#320

Post by colejohnson66 »

DeadBabyOrgasm wrote: post #314
marblar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...

Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.

Is there any good reason for having the "Referer:" tag at all?
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