Re: @font-face and slow downloading

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Levantovsky, Vladimir
<Vladimir.Levantovsky@monotypeimaging.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 20, 2010 11:52 AM John Daggett wrote:
>>
>> Ah, ok, your thinking is that there should be additional @font-face
>> syntax to specify the timeout?  Something like this?
>>
>>   @font-face {
>>     font-family: BongoTheFont;
>>     src: url(Bongo.woff);
>>     font-fallback-timeout: 5;  /* show fallback font after 5 seconds */
>>   }
>>
>> While this is something authors would prefer to control, it seems more
>> like a property that should be left to the user to control, since the
>> irritation level will vary by user depending upon whether no text or
>> popping text is more of an irritant for a given network connection and
>> device.
>>
>
> I agree with John that the fallback behavior / FOUT effect should be under user control (and we are talking about educated users here, which are minority of all web users, IMO), but I also like the approach that Beth proposed because it allows authors to control download behavior that otherwise may remain undefined.
>
> Can we marry both approaches where UA would give users full control if they choose to explicitly define fallback timeout(which would override author-specified value), but otherwise use the font-fallback-timeout property value defined by the author?

Yeah, this was discussed during the telcon this morning.  There are
two basic approaches that could work:

1. Explicitly nothing that the author directive in @font-face is a
hint, and will be overridden by user preferences in the UA.

2. Making this option available as a normal properly, valid only on
the root element, so that normal CSS cascade rules can apply and user
stylesheets can change it by themselves.

Beth brought up, though, that the author may want to set this
per-font, specifying some fonts as being necessary for the page, while
others are merely decorative and can fallback quickly or immediately.
So I lean towards option 1.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 19:59:55 UTC