Re: WebFonts ready for use

On Apr 30, 2008, at 3:42 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> 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.

Some of us don't serve up large script libraries (because of their  
size), especially through https, but are still very interested in  
using @font-face, and maybe with not just one font at a time, but two  
or three.

Also, if the page is blank until the font loads, then that is a bigger  
problem than if a picture doesn't load or a script is not yet available.

> 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.

It adds up if you need two or three of them, and need to traverse sub- 
domains with the same font needs.

> 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.

Yes, it is too bad that the UA cannot load the font in chunks. Load  
just the range of glyphs needed for the current page, then if another  
page needs more glyphs then just download them and add them on to what  
you already have. Otherwise, when you subset, you end up having to re- 
download a lot of the same glyphs of the same font for pages that have  
different subsets.

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

That may be true. I was trying to get a sense of this earlier. But I  
welcome anything that can improve on page loading times. And fonts,  
unlike images, are more likely to have the same popular font used on  
many different sites.

Its like you said in another e-mail:

On Apr 30, 2008, at 3:22 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Web content authors go to some lengths to reduce the number of  
> network transactions needed to load their page, using such  
> techniques as CSS sprites. So I don't think we can just write off  
> this concern.