Re: CSS3 Web Fonts issue with ‘block on download’

On May 7, 2009, at 9:08 AM, David Hyatt wrote:

> You don't want to see an unsightly visual flicker every time you use  
> an uncached downloadable font.  I think the behavior of just showing  
> nothing until the font is loaded is much better.  WebKit should  
> probably eventually display the wrong font after a certain timeout  
> period, but displaying the wrong font immediately is as bad as FOUC.

I also agree, especially if it was a relatively short timeout (a  
second or two). The effect on page load speed, especially on an HTTPS  
server, is one of my primary concerns.

Is there any way to just grab kerning, tracking, and width info first,  
so that the page can be drawn with the right geometries prior to  
getting all the glyph path information? If that would be faster, maybe  
it could be an additional standard for loading that separately if  
available (as in, from a separate file). Then it wouldn't look as FOUC- 
like, because it wouldn't force a reflow.


> In any case I definitely think this should be left up to  
> implementations to decide.  I don't see this as something that  
> should be in the spec.

I generally agree, unless the spec can provide a way to get the size  
of position info for each glyph much faster than getting the whole face.

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 17:18:47 UTC