- From: Brad Kemper <brkemper@comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:10:30 -0700
- To: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Cc: Erik Dahlström <ed@opera.com>, Paul Nelson <paulnel@winse.microsoft.com>, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>, www-style@w3.org, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
On Apr 30, 2008, at 1:56 AM, John Daggett wrote:
> I understand the reasoning here, showing *something* is better than
> missing glyph boxes or question marks but in this case allowing a
> downloaded webfont to be used in the system font fallback process
> would lead to rather odd behavior, the page rendering would
> effectively become a function of the browsing history.
>
> Say a user visits the BBC Bengali site which includes a downloaded
> web font. The user then browses to another Bengali site which
> renders correctly because of the font downloaded from the BBC site.
> But several days later, after the font has been cleared from the
> cache, if the user now visits that second site again missing glyphs
> appear instead. Makes for a rather inconsistent user experience.
Inconsistent, but not worse than having the glyphs missing both times
instead of once. At least the first time, the user had the glyphs to
read everything. The only thing that is worse is the troubleshooting
aspect of trying to figure out why the page didn't render correctly on
the second visit. Authors at the second site may even realize that
they could benefit by using the same font as the BBC, if they got
calls and e-mails about the behavior and recognized what caused it.
Also, its not that different from when one site has only one Bengali
font listed in "font-family" and another site has a second one listed
there to provide the missing glyphs of the first one. A user might
equally wonder why his font works fine on one site but shows question
marks on the other. In fact, I think you would need to use font-family
to pick up the extra glyphs anyway. So that could look something like
this on the second site:
{ font-family: myBengali, bbcBengali }
The main difference from our current situation is that the second site
would benefit from the font loaded via @font-face from the BBC site,
whereas today they would only benefit if the user had the font pre-
installed, or if the site had its own @font-face and made the user
wait for it to be downloaded again.
Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 14:11:13 UTC