Re: Webfont compression

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:10 AM, Dave Crossland<dave@lab6.com> wrote:
> It is used extremely widely by people who pay bandwidth bills, or are
> in charge of reducing them, but since bandwidth is so cheap for most
> sites these days, its maybe less common than it was...

FWIW, Wikipedia *still* doesn't gzip all its CSS/JS.  I've heard it
claimed this is due to bugs in some old browsers that would have
trouble with gzipped CSS/JS sometimes.  But it's true that a lot of
people just don't know about gzipping.

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:15 AM, John Hudson<tiro@tiro.com> wrote:
> I remain unconvinced that server-side compression is a sufficient answer to
> font compression, given that universal availability and ease of use don't
> seem to translate into universal application.

>From a web standards perspective, the correct fix is to get people to
use gzip more for *everything*, somehow.  Such as by asking the major
web server distributors to use better defaults.  If a new format is
going to be created *anyway*, I think it's a no-brainer that it should
include compression by default (or even make it mandatory), provided
the useful data is already non-human-readable.  But lack of
compression by itself is a rather weak reason to push a new format,
IMO, since it doesn't do anything to address the broader underlying
problem here.

Received on Thursday, 23 July 2009 00:39:22 UTC