Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Incremental Font Transfer: Patch Subset (Issue #849)

> > Due to the complex nature of fonts a smart server is pretty much necessary to efficiently transfer all classes of fonts.
> 
> That causes me concern, because HTTP systems scale well when the server doesn't need to be particularly smart. If we _need_ to add complex processing to the server, it's best to make it as generic as possible so that it can be reused, enhancing the incentive to implement it (especially by actors like CDNs).
> 
While I am not arguing against any of the benefits of making server side processing as generic as possible for it to be reused, and offer additional incentives for it to be implemented, I'd like to bring an additional consideration as part of this discussion - usability. 
Unicode-range subsetting has been one of the readily available font serving approaches, one that is capable of producing reduced size font files that are very cacheable and CDN friendly. This, however, still didn't noticeably improve user experience, and didn't provide enough incentives for authors to adopt for content using primarily CJK fonts. Our prior experiences with font serving that influenced the development of WOFF2, and the results of the user research summarized in [PFE evaluation document](https://www.w3.org/TR/PFE-evaluation/) clearly point to the fact that smart, font-specific approaches can yield significant benefits to users and authors alike, and should not be discarded for the sake of generalization if they benefit users in particular: [consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity](https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies).
(And, as a side note: WOFF2, initially conceived and born as a very font-specific compression technology, brought [Brotli](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7932) to the HTTP and the Web.)   


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