Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

Also sprach Spartanicus:

 > >    Downloadable fonts in general -
 > >      - Performance problems (download multi-megabyte CJK fonts?)
 > 
 > A user prompt that shows the size of the font would be my preferred way
 > to deal with the performance issue. This would have to be accompanied by
 > a method so that a user isn't prompted again if they choose not to
 > download fonts for example for that session.

I'm all for power to the user, but I think few would use the proposed
mechanism. A font family is very compressed data, roughly the size of
a photograph. A zipped font family for western languages is on the
order of 50k. Some are bigger, some are smaller -- just like images.
Therefore, I don't think they pose a big performance problem. 

Naturally, in constrained environments, you may not want to download
fonts at all -- just like images often are ignored.

 > As a user I'd want an option in my browser to prevent any fonts from
 > ever being downloaded, and to prevent being prompted to do so.

Yes. Just like Shift-I in Opera toggles images on/off, there should be
similar functionality for webfonts.

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome