Re: WebFonts ready for use

On Apr 28, 2008, at 9:10 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:

>
>
> On Apr 28, 2008, at 7:17 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>> We do not attempt to optimize for the case of bitwise identical  
>> font files loaded from different URLs - I am not sure this would be  
>> worth it.
>
> The reason I make a case for it is that
>
> a) font files tend to be larger than other types of linked files, so  
> minimizing the number of times the identical font has to be  
> transmitted is important,

Is that really the case? This page on a popular web app serves me a  
130k image, 60k of markup, 80k of CSS, and 500k of script: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/othermaciej/62682052/ 
 >. These are rough counts from using the Activity window in Safari on  
an uncached load.

Many of the fonts on my Mac OS X Leopard system range from 32k to  
600k. These do not seem big compared to normal web resources. The very  
biggest fonts I see (with really wide unicode repertoires and lots of  
CJK glyphs) are around 15M. These are closer to the size of a video or  
large PDF. With fonts of that size one would likely want to reduce the  
glyph repertoire to only include glyphs for needed scripts before  
serving.

It seems to me the font size concern may be overblown.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 10:43:09 UTC