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Comment by kutkloon7 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.

'Progressive styling' is way more annoying (in my humble opinion) than waiting some time. Pages like the verge can take minutes anyway, when the wifi is not optimal. When you do things progressively, the page just keeps on changing, and the page can't really be used. So if you have a long page with text, and the user is somewhere halfway, the font loads and... BOOM! You are reading text that is located 8 paragraphs from where you were reading one instant ago.

This is far more annoying with images which dont specify their size, but I would still consider it bad practice to use an uncommon font for non-artistic pages.

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The shifting page layout is a symptom of a broader problem, in that it's impossible to accurately predict or specify the rendered dimensions of text. Even measuring a container after the fact is unreliable because of the arbitrary amount of whitespace in different fonts. You'd have to generate a bitmap image and detect a bounding box around the pixels, which definitely won't help with loading times. This can't be done at development time because different browsers and system configurations all render the same fonts slightly differently. So, even sticking with system fonts to avoid this one symptom, we have this giant elephant in the room making it difficult to ensure anything but the most primitive layouts will be legible across devices.

Seems like it could at least be mitigated on the browser's side though: "This text was at the top of the viewport before the restyling, so let's scroll the document to the point where that text still appears at the top."

The text in column 1, 2, or 3? Or perhaps you were reading the text in the footer at the time that the page decided to slap on its makeup?

Yeah, so it clearly can't solve everything, hence "mitigate" instead of e.g. "completely solve". In any case, I'd argue that 90% of the time it's better than doing nothing at all.

Counting pixels is primitive; accepting text layout variance and making the web page look good with all variants and renderings of any reasonable font is less primitive.

Visually inspecting the output in a handful of environments and hoping it generalizes to all current and future environments, because there is no way to programmatically determine what the environment is actually doing with the content, is primitive. But it works well enough for blogs and shopping carts, so there must not be a problem.

"Legible" is a funny way to misspell "perfectly representative of the artist's unique and precious vision".

Whatever you want to call it when text can barely be read, falls out of alignment, or disapears entirely because a font renders at a fraction or multiple of the size of the desired font, despite being the same "size" in "centimeters" or "pixels" or "ems", or when hair-thin text that looks great on an iRetina is rendered on low-density screens, etc.

"Incompetence" is a good word.

Yes, but isn't it so that the system font is displayed in one step? I mean, if you just have HTML with images with their dimensions specified, I don't think the page will jump around.

>I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.

I suppose some people are happy with color: red, while others like a bit more variety and opt for color: #a82a33.

If #a82a33 takes ten seconds to load and everything is invisible until it does, you're absolutely right I'm happy with red!

> I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.

Imagine you're a company whose business operates exclusively through your website. Imagine further that your company is the sort for whom design is critical because it drives your business. You are going to insist on making sure everything looks perfect in every scenario.

You can think of it as design control-freakery. Typography really matters to some people.

"The sort of company for whom design is critical" doesn't coincide at all with the sort of company for whose website a pixel-perfect layout makes sense. Why would expert designers show off bad typography instead of good, and in the website rather than in products?

This "design control-freakery" proves that someone doesn't master simple and proven web technology. Why would you trust them with something technically complex like faithful color printing or something "artistic" like designing a logo?

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