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You can, but then you're limited to a single font format and you would not gain any benefits from the browsers' ability to download in parallel.

A lot of this will improve when HTTP/2 becomes more common (you can push resource to the browser and parallel downloads will become more efficient).

I use this technique to great effect, and i would recommend this. Woff i very well supported generally, and then i put a backup to the actual file for the lagging browsers.

http://caniuse.com/#search=woff

This.

Though, depending on the font (and how many), its glyphs, etc. you can get pretty bloated CSS files so while you do load the fonts earlier, you could be waiting just as long in the end.

I sometimes put them on a CDN to help alleviate some of the potential delay to download and/or render.

Sure, but this keeps the documents separate or even on a different server, like FontAwesome or Google.