Re: @font-face and slow downloading

On Jan 17, 2011, at 18:52 , John Daggett wrote:

> David Singer wrote:
> 
>> what I meant by 'as similar as possible' was not precise matching, but
>> roughly 'gee if your custom font is monospace, at least choose a
>> monospace font with about the same advance/font-size ratio as the
>> fallback, and if your custom is condensed, try to find a condensed face
>> as the fallback, and so on, so that text lays out roughly in the overall
>> same-ish amount of space'.  Obviously matching all the metrics,
>> line-breaks, word positioning etc. would mean, as you say, you've almost
>> got the same font, so why bother with the custom one?
> 
> As long as that's authoring advice and not user-agent behavior you're
> talking about, I think it would be fine to include a discussion in the
> spec.
> 

yes, exactly, it's authoring advice.  many authors have the font locally or can download it fast; they may never see the temporary fallback behavior, so I think it worthwhile pointing it out to them that they should give it a moment's thought.

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.