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Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

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Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#41

Post by fao_ »

Klathmon wrote: post #12
anonymish wrote: post #4

There are some really valid points in here and I dislike the idea of using the whole font when only a few icons are required. But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? I would think that does more harm than everyone grabbing a fully cached copy once from a cdn.

It's one of those things that works "in a perfect world", but in the real world it just doesn't work out that well. For starters, leveraging caching via a common CDN pretty much requires everyone to be using a single version from a single CDN. If you can't agree on that, then every time a new version comes out the web is split and the caching doesn't work, and every time someone decides to use another CDN (or someone…

Interesting. These points seem to apply to ld.so, as well :)

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#42

Post by matt_kantor »

koolba wrote: post #24
anonymish wrote: post #4

There are some really valid points in here and I dislike the idea of using the whole font when only a few icons are required. But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? I would think that does more harm than everyone grabbing a fully cached copy once from a cdn.

> But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? Disk is cheap. Particularly disks that you don't pay for like your users' disks.

It's not about disk, it's about network I/O. Making your resource "more unique" means more cache misses and more requests that need to be served (in theory anyway, see Klathmon's sibling comment[0] for more on this).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13138826

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#44

Post by fortawesome »

This is a great article. Some of these are already on the agenda for FA5, but there's some new stuff there for us too. We'll dig in and it's a TODO on the FA5 roadmap now. :)

Another thing I'm super excited about is stray points in vectors. We found some new tools for Illustrator that make this a LOT easier and will have a very real impact on bandwidth as well.

Super fun.

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#45

Post by nandhp »

Klathmon wrote: post #12
anonymish wrote: post #4

There are some really valid points in here and I dislike the idea of using the whole font when only a few icons are required. But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? I would think that does more harm than everyone grabbing a fully cached copy once from a cdn.

It's one of those things that works "in a perfect world", but in the real world it just doesn't work out that well. For starters, leveraging caching via a common CDN pretty much requires everyone to be using a single version from a single CDN. If you can't agree on that, then every time a new version comes out the web is split and the caching doesn't work, and every time someone decides to use another CDN (or someone…

> For starters, leveraging caching via a common CDN pretty much requires everyone to be using a single version from a single CDN. If you can't agree on that, then every time a new version comes out the web is split and the caching doesn't work, and every time someone decides to use another CDN (or someone provides a new one) the group is split again.

All this common web stuff that is distributed by several CDNs (as well as separately by individuals) really suggests to me that there should some browser feature like `` that would allow the browser to treat copies of the file from different CDNs as the same. (This would nicely eliminate most of the privacy concerns with third-party jQuery CDNs as well.)

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#46

Post by matt4077 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #32
Klathmon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deceptively hard problem to solve. installing a ton of fonts up front takes a pretty significant amount of space, installing a subset for their language/preference or letting the user manage it makes it VERY easy to fingerprint users based on what fonts they download, and doing any kind of cross-origin long-term caching is a security nightmare as it lets you begin to map out where a user has been just based on…

Exactly, but I would take it further... It solves a problem that people other than web designers care very little about, but costs me money and creates a slew of other problems... Personally, I wish it was easy to just turn off!

Fonts are a pretty important factor in design. Most people may not explicitly notice it, but it certainly affects the impression they get from a website.

You could compare it with http/2: If you do a survey, you won't find many people even knowing it. That doesn't mean it's useless to them.

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#47

Post by dietr1ch »

Klathmon wrote: post #12
anonymish wrote: post #4

There are some really valid points in here and I dislike the idea of using the whole font when only a few icons are required. But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? I would think that does more harm than everyone grabbing a fully cached copy once from a cdn.

It's one of those things that works "in a perfect world", but in the real world it just doesn't work out that well. For starters, leveraging caching via a common CDN pretty much requires everyone to be using a single version from a single CDN. If you can't agree on that, then every time a new version comes out the web is split and the caching doesn't work, and every time someone decides to use another CDN (or someone…

Wouldn't some hashing allow to change cdn without problems? There'll be a lot of room for improvement until the web looks closer to a big p2p network.

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#48

Post by IgorPartola »

aerique wrote: post #10
proaralyst wrote: post #5

What's the argument against icon fonts? Using actual SVGs?

Icon fonts have been breaking websites for people that do not allow websites to set their fonts.

Are those the same people that disable JavaScript everywhere too? Imagine that you were running desktop apps and said "ok I want this program, but I only want it to use standard widgets, my chosen font, and not use certain API's. Wait why does this look funny and not work right?!"

Re: Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

#50

Post by chrisan »

hmottestad wrote: post #25
chrisan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious and checked out FA's CDN https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v4.7.0/fonts/FontAwesom... and the rest of the fonts as https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v4.7.0/fonts/fontawesom... (not sure why they name the OTF differently) otf 110KB eot 102KB svg 157KB ttf 102KB woff 96.1KB woff2 75.8KB All appear to be using gzip in headers

On my machine, the otf version uses much less bandwidth. From 52.4 kb to 16.4.

I'm getting the same results in Chrome using mac, win10, or ubuntu.

Are you using the same URLs I posted?

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