Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts-4] font-display: optional without relayout (#4108)

> `optional` is intended to prioritize the user experience (no layout jumping) over the authoring design intent (pretty fonts).

I'm not convinced this design does a good job of that.  There are other aspects of user experience that are also relevant here:  for example, I think users would be bothered by having bold and/or italic text in a fallback font when the primary text was in the downloaded font.  (There might also be problems with accented characters for, e.g., Latin-script locales that use characters outside of Latin1, depending on how fonts are typically chunked for download.)

> I'd love to be able to give web devs the advice "apply font-display:optional and this won't be a problem", but today we can't do that.

I think this might be plausible "won't be a problem" advice for pages that use only a single font face (no weight variation, no italic/oblique variation) and only use ASCII characters (or perhaps a slightly broader Latin set depending on how the fonts they use are provided).  But I think anything more advanced, which is a *lot* of the Web, is going to involve *tradeoffs* here.

(And remember that a bunch of the existing design of downloadable fonts is about trying not to download a ton more fonts than needed, given the reality of multiple weights, multiple styles, and large character ranges.)

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Received on Sunday, 12 January 2020 18:05:16 UTC