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Comment by sil3ntmac | Hacker News Reader

Kilimanjaro called it yesterday :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357578

Thanks google, love ya guys ;-)

Now, what would be the benefit of calling:

  http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Inconsolata

which in turn serves the css that contains the real call to the font:

  @font-face { font-family: 'Inconsolata'; 
  src: url('http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=J_eeEGgHN8Gk3Eud0dz8jw') 
  format('truetype'); }

So, why two trips, instead of just one?

What I'd do is just call the font directly and teach developers to use @font-face

And shrink the url a bit:

  http://fonts.googleapis.com/Inconsolata

Remember, once it gets widespread use it would be harder to change a single char

I wish they'd serve everything from subdomains in google.com. I mean, seriously, why does Google keep registering new domains for projects (google<something>.com) when they could easily use <something>.google.com instead? What's wrong with fonts.google.com?

My guess is they don't want to send all the cookies stored on the google.com domain whenever someone loads a font.

Seems reasonable. It protects users too because they can't track the cookies across these domains even if they wanted to.

Yahoo does this as well for the same cookie reason. Lots of stuff is hosted on yahoo.net that's considered potentially unsafe.

I believe that it's handling the browser differences server-side.

Is there any specific benefit to doing this? Does it decrease the number of files loaded?

it decreases the size of the CSS file slightly since you don't have to repeat every browser's version

It says “The API will generate the necessary CSS specific to the user's browser so you can use the font on your page.” If you change your user-agent, you’ll see it change.

I'm looking at a few other similar services which also include legal text in the CSS file, I wonder if this might be another reason.

It is important to note as well that http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=J_eeEGgHN8Gk3Eu... doesn't return just the font but the font that works with the browser that requested it. In IE it gives the EOT font in Chrome it gives the TTF

Another very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.

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