Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

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On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, Octavio Alvarez Piza wrote:

> I prefer font servers though, because of downloading of ALL 
> glyphs, instead of the ones just needed.

How are font servers supposed to work across the Web?

My computer might know about a font server, but it probably won't 
have the fonts used on your web site, especially fonts that have 
been developed specially for that site. To get around that, the web 
page could specify the URI for a font server. The next question is
what glyphs to ask the font server for, as the whole font may be
too large. The browser could in principle wait for the entire
document to be loaded and figure out for itself what glyphs are
needed, but that precludes incremental display as the document is
being downloaded.

The CSS2 @font-face mechanism includes a means to specify Unicode
ranges, and is intended to be used to avoid checking or downloading 
a font that does not have sufficient glyphs to render a particular 
character. For details, see:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html

I would suggest that the @font-face mechanism meets your needs,
and that there is also value in a simpler syntax for the case
where a designer just wants to name the URL for a font file with 
font-family if the font isn't already available, and together
with a fallback if the named file can't be downloaded.


  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>  W3C lead for multimodal interaction
  http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett +44 1225 866240 (or 867351)

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Received on Tuesday, 25 April 2006 17:12:07 UTC