Re: @font-face and slow downloading

On Oct 12, 2010, at 7:26 AM, John Daggett wrote:

> Which behavior is worse, popping vs. no text, is somewhat a user
> preference, so it would be nice to allow users to vary this to their
> choosing and to match their network environment (i.e. slow/fast network).

I agree with you and Håkon that different behavior is ideal in different user environments (network speed, bandwidth, etc), but I don't think a user preference is the right way to solve that. If we think this is a real issue for sites using web fonts, then I think we should let web developers control the behavior by adding syntax to @font-face to indicate what should happen in the slow-downloading case. I haven't figured out what that syntax would look like, but fundamentally, the current WebKit behavior is non-ideal, the current Firefox behavior is non-ideal, and I am sure that any hard-coded magic delay number will also be non-ideal in many circumstances. I think the web developer is in the best position to determine what is ideal based on how he/she uses the web font in his/her design. 

-Beth

Received on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 14:41:13 UTC