Re: Average Font Size in the Simulation

On 2020-10-07 23:50, Myles C. Maxfield wrote:
> Since we’re using “whole font” as the baseline instead of “unicode 
> range,” it stands to reason we’re gathering evidence relative to what 
> most normal websites are doing today: e.g. throwing a font up on a 
> server and referencing it from a CSS file. I don’t think 100% of web 
> fonts in use are woff2 files.

No, according to the 2019 Web Almanac only 70-75%. WOFF1 is the next 
most common at 12 to 15%, then incorrectly-labelled octet-stream, and 
then a few percent of TTF.

> If we /also/ wanted to gather metrics about how well we’re doing 
> compared to what Google Fonts does today (e.g. unicode range sending 
> all WOFF2 fonts) then that would be interesting in addition to what 
> we’re gathering now. But not /instead of/ what we’re gathering now.
Right.
> The initial download is truetype or opentype, not WOFF2. It probably 
> could/will be WOFF2 whenever this thing gets finalized and available 
> to website authors, but there’s more research required about how to 
> make range requests work with compression.
Okay. I had thought that the ranges were o the uncompressed file if the 
compression is using Content Transfer Encoding (ie not a woff2, but 
instead served with on the fly zlib or brotli compression) but I coud 
well be wrong.
> I already started this research and I’m confident that it’s not too 
> difficult (Brotli already has the concept of independent blocks inside 
> it) but there’s more research to be done here.
Sounds good.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media