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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

I am a typography nerd but let's be real here: web fonts are not so important that you should trade away your visitors' privacy. A CSS system fonts approach [0] is not only great for user privacy but results in better performance, security and more consistent GUIs.

[0] See https://flaviocopes.com/css-system-fonts/#popular-websites-u... . In the future, web devs might reliably use "font-family: system-ui;"

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Typekit uses the same CSS system. One massive reason people use services like it is licensing. It’s a pretty cheap service, no per-font costs and you are sure that the way fonts are delivered is legal.

I am not using one of these services. I had to pay $600 for a font family, still have a page view count in my license (I am supposed to track that myself and purchase a bigger license if it exceeds) and I have to make sure fonts are not easy to download (license requires me to figure out how to prevent downloads myself).

So it’s not hard to see why Typekit is very appealing — you don’t have to deal with any of that.

Or you can use one of the many fonts under a free license, e.g. anything from Google Fonts. (Which, of course, you download and then self-host.)

Well, of course. But limiting design to just open source fonts is really restrictive.

Is there no one selling licenses and giving you the files directly these days? There's zero technical need to involve JavaScript in the process.

There are! The second paragraph in my first comment goes into detail on this. You can purchase the font and get the files, but it's still on you to track views and make sure the files are delivered to the browser safely (preventing easy downloads).

Edit: it seems this entire thread is heavily downvoted -- both sides of the argument. Is it off-topic? Bad faith? Why the downvotes?

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