RE: New work on fonts at W3C

On Friday, June 19, 2009 2:42 PM Ambrose Li wrote:
> To: robert@ocallahan.org
> 
> 2009/6/18 Levantovsky, Vladimir
> <Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com>:
> >
> > Web users who rely on downloadable fonts to render certain languages
> are likely to have slow and unreliable internet connections - they
> would definitely benefit from downloadable fonts being as small as
> possible. This is where efficient compression becomes most valuable,
> and it does not discriminate - it will compress equally well a font
> that you've got for free, or the one that you chose to pay for.
> > As far as quality is concerned - you are free to choose to use a
free
> font of poor quality or pay a few bucks for a font that is high-
> quality. It's your website and nobody shall deny you this freedom of
> choice.
> 
> I don't understand this. If you have to rely on downloadable fonts
> then you have to download a new font for every different site you
> visit, and if subsetting is required then you may even have to
> download a new font for different parts of the same site. If reducing
> bandwidth is a concern, why would this be even a solution that is
> worth considering?
> 

In some cases, using downloadable fonts can be just the matter of style
and design - you either see the website exactly as it was created or you
may use a default resident font, which would produce readable text
albeit with different style and page layout. However, when it comes to
different languages - if I am given the choice of being able to view the
text on a website (with downloadable fonts supported) or not being able
to see the text at all (just all blanks), I would choose to download a
font whenever a language of the website I go to is not supported by
resident set of fonts. Using downloadable fonts is not a requirement,
it's an option that makes web text content accessible anytime, anywhere.

As far as subsetting is concerned - I don't think it should ever be
required; web designer should be able to make that call knowing what the
content and the language of a page is. E.g. for a full page in Hebrew he
may choose to download the whole font, for a page of text in Chinese
with ~1000 characters on it - he would be much better off downloading a
font subset.

Cheers,
Vladimir

> 
> --
> cheers,
> -ambrose

Received on Friday, 19 June 2009 19:14:47 UTC