Re: @font-face and slow downloading

Beth Dakin wrote:

> > Which behavior is worse, popping vs. no text, is somewhat a user
> > preference, so it would be nice to allow users to vary this to their
> > choosing and to match their network environment (i.e. slow/fast
> > network).
> 
> I agree with you and Håkon that different behavior is ideal in
> different user environments (network speed, bandwidth, etc), but I
> don't think a user preference is the right way to solve that. If we
> think this is a real issue for sites using web fonts, then I think we
> should let web developers control the behavior by adding syntax to
> @font-face to indicate what should happen in the slow-downloading
> case. I haven't figured out what that syntax would look like, but
> fundamentally, the current WebKit behavior is non-ideal, the current
> Firefox behavior is non-ideal, and I am sure that any hard-coded magic
> delay number will also be non-ideal in many circumstances. I think the
> web developer is in the best position to determine what is ideal based
> on how he/she uses the web font in his/her design. 

Ah, ok, your thinking is that there should be additional @font-face
syntax to specify the timeout?  Something like this?

  @font-face {
    font-family: BongoTheFont;
    src: url(Bongo.woff);
    font-fallback-timeout: 5;  /* show fallback font after 5 seconds */
  }
  
While this is something authors would prefer to control, it seems more
like a property that should be left to the user to control, since the
irritation level will vary by user depending upon whether no text or
popping text is more of an irritant for a given network connection and
device.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 15:52:36 UTC