Re: [css-fonts] font prefetch hints

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Yoav Weiss <yoav@yoav.ws> wrote:

> Regarding the opt-in for preloading purposes, I believe (but have not
> proved yet) that it may not be necessary, and that CSS based resources can
> be preloaded without it, at least for the majority of cases.


A smarter CSS preloader would be *awesome*, and if you can make it happen,
you'll be my hero... again. :)

That said, while a smarter preloader would definitely help many sites, it
is also not sufficient. Simple example: a JS constructed page that builds
up its DOM from API data, etc -- preloader wouldn't be able to do much. A
more complicated example: section of my site is displayed on-demand and
uses a font that is otherwise not used anywhere else, and pulls in a new
background image. For obvious reasons, I'd like to preload those resources
before the user triggers the display of said section, such that they are
not forced to wait for those to download.

Both approaches work together: we need an explicit signal, and we could
definitely use a smarter preloader.

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:15 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:

> The key problem a preload hint would solve is that the decision
> about whether to use a font or not happens fairly late in the page
> loading process. The hint would simply short circuit the "is this
> font used?" process and add it to the load queue.
>

Yep, exactly. Same logic applies for background images, and/or any other
CSS initiated fetches.

ig