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Self-host your fonts for better performance

wicki.io

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Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#271

Post by coliveira »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #262
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable

And then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).

But this is exactly the nature of the problem: a company that has basically the power of big government dictating what people will do without their previous approval. The very existence of such a company is anti-democratic. Now we are stuck with a single company dominating a public service (internet) that affects the lives of billions of people around the world and we don't have a say on how they manage this network.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#272

Post by acdha »

lukepothier wrote: post #257
acdha wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright and size: fonts are larger than you might think because they need full Unicode support and good fonts have tuned variants for different weights, styles, and sizes, along with alternate symbols and ligatures, etc. which all add up. Self-hosting is the way to go since it gives you full artistic control and you can use things like the Unicode-range CSS property to tell clients how to combine smaller fonts so y…

> fonts are larger than you might think because they need full Unicode support Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but don't the vast majority of fonts _not_ include full Unicode support, or even close to it? I know of GNU Unifont, but not many people are using that on the web... I take your point on selectively downloading the relevant glyphs for the user's locale, but this could be done by the browser too - it is a…

full coverage, yes, that's relatively uncommon but the most popular fonts will have a wide variety of languages and that adds up even if you don't support Chinese but do want coverage of the range of fonts designers want to use.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#273

Post by cratermoon »

scaladev wrote: post #33
robin_reala wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a really fast web experience, try disabling images and javascript too! (on rereading this I sounded sarcastic, but I really wasn’t trying to be)

uBlock Origin has a setting to prevent loading elements above certain size. I personally find it to be a nice middle ground. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

It would be awesome if uBlock Origin was able to dynamically determine a size limit based on how long assets take to load. Perhaps this is a task for the browser itself, though. Monitor throughput and latency and adjust page load behavior to limit or delay large elements.

I wonder, though, how the client determines the size? Doesn't that require at least a HEAD request, introducing another round trip?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#274

Post by gogopuppygogo »

sslayer wrote: post #214
AstroJetson wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is one of the many reasons I've stopped the almost hourly updates of Chrome. I feel fo people that have bad bandwidth or poor wireless connections. One of my favorite rants if web builders and more importantly the managers of team that build websites were forced to use a DSL speed level connection daily a lot of the cruft would go away.

At this point Big Tech is no different than Big Government and just as out of touch with those forced to live with it's decisions.

Except we give government a monopoly on things like nuclear weapons...

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#275

Post by chadlavi »

If you have a specific brand font, it's not going to be on Google Fonts anyway, so you're gonna self-host. And if you don't have a specific brand font, you should really just use web safe font stacks that leverage local fonts. System fonts look a lot better these days than they used to.

Basically, does anyone who's doing serious work use Google Fonts anyway? I just assumed it was a thing that mostly hobbyists and personal websites used.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#277

Post by cratermoon »

cpach wrote: post #185
tomcam wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is charging for a font rent seeking?

It isn’t :)

It's rent-seeking if, instead of selling you the font once under a mutually agreeable license, they charge you an ongoing fee to "use" the font under conditions that the foundry controls and can change without re-negotiating the contract. This is especially true if the condition are "you can use for purposes x, y, and z, but if you want to use it for a, b, or c you have to pay a higher rate".

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#278

Post by viridian »

nerdponx wrote: post #177
b112 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radicalization is the style of the time! Their side is heinous, evil, and kills babies. Our side is just, wondrous, and angel like. Thus, they enslave, we strive to break free, and bask in the pure bliss our utter and complete correctness enables.

Both sides, amirite?

I flagged your post, so I owe you an explanation: This comment comes across as dismissive ("amirite") and is unlikely to generate good discussion. Inf act, it's the exact kind of comment you would make if you wanted to flame bait.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#279

Post by folmar »

ada1981 wrote: post #119

Does this mean that all CDN hosting of libraries, etc. will now be semi pointless for optimization?

It already mostly is, it is a odd hit to be using exactly the same library from the same CDN as you do.

But people also use it for being faster than their main server as CDNs put more effort to be fast than mom-and-pop.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#280

Post by folmar »

jfk13 wrote: post #225
danielheath wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...

That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.

Could you just get the icon name in that case? For me it would be good-enough, or, in many cases, better than the crammed design-first icons (Slack, I'm pointing at you!).
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