I have a problem with Google web fonts. Sometimes connectivity to Google is problematic. For example in China after searching the wrong keyword all connections to Google are blocked for 1.5 minutes. This leads to sites with Google web fonts not hosted locally to hang in loading as it waits for a response from Google. This has led me to hosting web fonts locally.<p>Was wondering if anyone has a better solution. Or if anyone from Google is reading this, could they place web fonts on a different domain/IP and pray that global censors don't list it?<p>Kinda nice to be able use cached versions of the fonts.<p>I only use China as an example. I have had problems with Google web fonts in other country and on bad connections.<p>edit: watching the video it sounds like by hosting locally I am not taking advantage of the different versions served to different operating systems.
Using a nice typeface provides an incredible boost to site design. I'm a very happy user of Google Web Fonts (PT Sans and Ubuntu Mono) on my site <a href="http://typing.io" rel="nofollow">http://typing.io</a><p>Very small performance suggestion: minify the initial css!
I wonder if there is a downside to letting Google act as a CDN for Web Fonts and common javascript libraries. /tinfoil hat<p>Common resources distributed to browser caches everywhere is an attractive proposition but you're also giving Google a lot of data you might not want.
Given the huge number of distinct files served by the Webfont API, I think it's fair to have some healthy scepticism regarding the client-side caching benefits this article emphasises. While I can count on all you MBP-wielding, startup-cruising hackers to be primed with Open Serif, I'm less confident about the corporate desk jockeys who are my real users. Worth noting too that using fonts because they are widely distributed is more or less exactly what we have been trying to get away from. Still, font subsets are awesome, especially if you only need alphanumeric latin characters. For example:<p><pre><code> <link rel="stylesheet" href="
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid%20Serif
&text=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890.,
" />
</code></pre>
...sends Chrome back a minuscule 8.5K worth of font. Glorious!
Amen on the very last line "web fonts are here to stay". I'm amazed that in 2012 I'm still working with developers who act like it's something we may want to try next year. It's time to realize that this is a technology that should have taken off ten years ago and now it's time to play catch up.
>Next, the font file size can be further reduced by eliminating font hinting meta data, as some platforms do not support it.<p>Not sure if I understood that correctly... do we make the decision depending on the platform, or do we remove the hinting data <i>for all platforms</i> just to improve the compression?
Please not use Google web-font is slower and harm you privacy.<p>[Google fonts]
43ms -> [------>] DNS
120ms -> [-------] [----->] Get Css
150ms -> [----------------] [---------->] Get-rel woff font<p>Proof:
<a href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Skranji" rel="nofollow">http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Skranji</a>
-->
<a href="http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/skranji/v1/Rkre06NW1995RvIlAXa7Ng.woff" rel="nofollow">http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/skranji/v1/...</a><p>Use font squire and convert to base64_font -> better faster stronger
Side question: can HTML5 storage be used to store the downloaded fonts so as to prevent a reload should the cache be blown out at some point?<p>Or is this not even worth considering?
I thought of an evil hack w/ web fonts the other day. Seems it'd be fairly simple to use randomly re-sorted fonts (where characters are mapped to improper code points) as a kind of one-time-pad to jam HTML scrapers or surveillance of the line. The user's browser would get the appropriate font and be able to read the text; anyone reading the raw HTML would get gibberish, forcing anyone trying to extract the data to use OCR. Obviously this would kill your site for search engines, screen readers, etc., so the only use would be if you're seriously paranoid about your data getting scraped, and only then if the scraper had limited resources (the NSA, etc. can probably spare a few cycles for OCR).