Hacker News Reader

Comment by john-doe | Hacker News Reader

I understand the author’s stance, but it’s probably mostly motivated by the fact that he runs a web publishing service (mataora.blog) where you can potentially write in any script, making it hard to support good multi-script typography without loading webfonts conditionally[0] (also, except for the Noto family, there are almost no universal, good-looking options.)

Thanks to variable fonts, you can nowadays get a full typographic palette (including small-caps, italics, all weights from 100 to 900) on a 300KB budget, sometimes less. The article sports an image that’s 170KB, so it’s a question of priorities I guess.

[0] modern browsers actually got good at this, using unicode ranges: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/%40font-fac...

View on HN

You can also subset a couple of weights and come in under 60kB, which is what most sites should be doing. (Obviously not applicable for multilingual sites and esp East Asian ones)

Edit: also, fonts are by default loaded conditionally by browsers.

That’s one of the reasons you typically use a preload to speed things up: otherwise the browser will wait for the first paint following CSSOM construction to know which font faces are used on the page, and thus what to download.

In other words, specifying the 200 @font-face’s possible on a site actually poses no issues - only those fonts actually used will be downloaded.

Not sure why anyone would want to specify a font for content like a blog. To think your taste is more important than peoples preferences and settings seems incredibly self centered, or dare I say narcissistic.

There are no “peoples preferences” when it comes to fonts. 99% use the default settings of their browser, so any effort made to improve typesetting of a particular publication is I think more than welcome.

This! I use a custom font for my blog because there are meaningful layout and design differences between typefaces. Even "similar" faces like Arial, San Francisco or Roboto look dramatically different applied to a whole page—font metrics affect the leading (line-height), paragraph width, font size and more. If I don't know the font, those are all unknown variables, and I don't want to QA my blog on 1000 different browser/OS/device combinations.

So I use two weights (regular and bold), each weighing in at 30kb, woff2 only, preloaded in the HTML and served with long-life cache headers. I know that some users have turned off web fonts, but they've chosen that pain. For the other 99%, I just want my blog to look decent.

>> There are no “peoples preferences” when it comes to fonts.

Then why do designers have them? One would hope browser vendors would select and ship a good set of default fonts, but I suppose that's not the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com