RE: Flash of unstyled text/Flash of unfonted content

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Ben Weiner <ben@readingtype.org.uk>:

>Is a W3 spec required on rendering with a fallback font and then 
>updating the page, or could we agree that this is how it should be done?

I think a discussion of how it should be done can always bear fruit, W3 spec
or no.
One set of questions are: who should ultimately make the decision about what
behavior prevails? Should it be left to the user via settings within the
browser? Or should it be left to web authors to choose from a set of options
- via CSS or some other mechanism? Or, should there be one set of rules for
all browsers, period, with which users and authors will have to go along.
(Add-ons aside.)
Or some combination of the above?
There's a lot of gray area. Plus, there is a clear aesthetic aspect, which
always creates contention. Some don't mind the visible restyling of text as
the downloaded font is applied. They say, so what? Some do think it's
distracting and ugly. In this, there is no clear right and wrong, just
different tastes and philosophies.
 
>Whatever, the thing should not require web developers to write JS hacks...

I agree wholeheartedly, and I like writing JS hacks.

Regards,

Rich




-----Original Message-----
From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Ben Weiner
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 8:33 AM
To: www-font
Subject: Flash of unstyled text/Flash of unfonted content

Hi,

Levantovsky, Vladimir wrote:
> FWIW, the issue with IE not rendering a page until fonts are downloaded
has been addressed here [1].
> There are few other demo pages [2] where you can clearly observe FOUT
effect.
>
> Vlad
>
> [1] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/demos/4/about4.aspx
> [2] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/
>
>   
But isn't this ancient history?

Have current browser developers addressed the loading issue? Right now I 
think it's handled quite well in Firefox, which renders in the core font 
specified in CSS as fallback while it downloads the web font and then 
updates the page with the downloaded font. Safari shows nothing except 
the link underlines, which has got to be wrong.

Is a W3 spec required on rendering with a fallback font and then 
updating the page, or could we agree that this is how it should be done? 
Whatever, the thing should not require web developers to write JS hacks...

Cheers,
Ben

-- 
Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html

Received on Wednesday, 14 October 2009 14:03:13 UTC