Re: @font-face and slow downloading

John Daggett wrote:

 > > The summary is this: Currently, WebKit doesn't display any text until
 > > the resource has downloaded, but when a resource takes a really long
 > > time to download, the failure to display any text for so long is
 > > confusing and a bad user experience. Firefox chooses to display a
 > > fallback font right away, and then flashes to the @font-face font once
 > > it has finished downloading. This FOUC is not a particularly pleasant
 > > user experience either, and based on the activity in the bug, it looks
 > > like the Mozilla folks want to tweak it.
 > 
 > Right, I think the question is what the delay should be.  Too long and
 > the viewer doesn't see the text of a page for a slow loading font, too
 > soon and you get a "double pop", white to fallback, then fallback to
 > downloaded.

There are cases where the webfont will not be downloaded at all. For
example, on a mobile phone with narrow bandwidth, or if every kB costs
you money, you may not want to use webfonts. Just like images can be
turned off in certain browsers.

Therefore, I don't think the spec should try to define delays or other
behavior which is dependent on the user's environment. 

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 13:01:49 UTC