Comment by Seirdy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Seirdy | Hacker News Reader

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- External fonts are blocked by security-conscious users (including every Tor Browser user who remembers to set the browser security level correctly) for a reason: they're a major attack vector

- External fonts are often purely cosmetic. Using what over time adds up to several megabytes of data for cosmetics is inconsiderate.

- inb4 "just disable remote fonts if you hate them": doing so breaks many websites that use icon fonts. Expecting users to have to manually configure 50+ websites (yes I did this, I count 54 websites on my exception list) is just insane.

- Many people need to use local fonts. Some dyslexic people actively choose a font that helps them read more easily. Asking someone to play the whack-a-mole game of "will disabling remote fonts break this site's icons or not" game on every site because of a disability just isn't right.

Just use sans, serif, and monospace for content. Let the user agent decide what that looks like, not your company's branding.

to be honest, why have corporate colours or logos either, or use photographs or artwork that causes extra bytes of data to be downloaded for mere cosmetic effect. i think corporate websites should consist of either the english word 'good' or the english word 'bad' based on whether the company is determined to be worthy, say by a committee headed by this dude, with an ASN.1 encoded block of data available for download for any ancilliary information required.

thank you for coming to my TED talk...

There is a big difference between shipping a 192px PNG/WebP image and shipping a custom font. Most of the criticisms I mentioned don't apply to something as small and safe as a logo.

Small PNGs with good alt text are not as unsafe, large, and brittle as third party fonts.

You're not responding to what I said; you're responding to a caricature of what you imagine me to be like. Doing so derails the discussion.

Cosmetics can be used, but they need a strict performance budget. I'd say that 50kb of render-blocking/CLS-inducing cosmetics and 250kb total cosmetics would be quite generous for 90% of corporate websites, though I'd rather see much lower sizes and reserve more space for content. I would not count inline images that convey information as part of an article's content in this budget.

I'm so glad there are people that are much more creative than you would have the world be, and I'm so glad there is push back on the creatives from just going nuts. However, I never want to live in a world where you're the winning voice in website design. So boring because of some electrons getting annoyed? Good text treatments lend itself to good graphic design. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it. I lived through web1.0, and I'm happy we can finally do things like have different fonts. If we could only get pages to flow just like in Illustrator or InDesign or Quark or whatever, that would be so much better. Instead, we have to live with sticty strict stricts like you fighting to keep things in blocks of boringness.

If you're worried about 3rd party fonts, then force the team to self-host the fonts. If the chosen fonts are not to the end user's liking, they can always override (if they are nerdy enough to know how). Just because lazy devs use 3rd party dosn't mean the baby has to be thrown out with the bath water.

1. Remote fonts, first or third party, are still a massive attack surface. This is why the Tor Browser's Torbutton disables them.

2. Non-default fonts for text still create a suboptimal experience for users with reading impairments like dyslexia who could benefit from using their preferred fonts in place of sans/serif without breaking pages that need icon fonts.

> Just because you don't like it doesn't mean the rest of the world should suffer without it.

By the same token, just because your design/marketing departments think a design "pops" doesn't mean that disadvantaged users should have to suffer by your personal preferences. People who need privacy (e.g tor users who disable js/JIT/SVG/any non-whitelisted fonts), extra a11y (changing default colors, fonts, layouts), and extra bandwidth constraints (satellite internet with high packet loss) exist too, and excessive web design frequently gets these people shafted.

I'm not saying that the world needs to change for my personal preferences; I'm saying that the world needs to cater less to personal preferences and more towards people's needs. People who make up a disadvantaged minority of users need disproportionate levels of accommodation, and their needs are more important than graphic design.

but, you can do both, right? that's what alternative text titles and descriptions of images are for, and the font is used to render test that has already been downloaded as utf-8/ascii/whatever characters making up the content of the html tags in the document. lynx exists. screen readers for the blind exist. that's no reason to try and downgrade the aesthetic experience for everyone else. i mean, i remember usenet and gopher, the web and html are just better, prettier, nicer to look at - a well laid out and designed page of content makes me happy, assuming the content is something i'm interested in, but even that isn't nescessary sometimes. and sure, i'm sad for vision impaired people who can't experience that, and sites that don't provide accessible versions of their content are bad and wrong, of course - but that doesn't mean i need to dilute my own experience to match. it'd be like banning people from going hill-walking because wheelchair users can't participate. the correct response it to try and work out how to include and enable access foir the wheelchair users without destroying the experience for everyone else - put in a cable car or something, i don't know. so yeah, i agree with your sentiments in the last two paragraphs above, i just think there's a better way to solve that problem - upgrade everyone's experience.

It's like talking to a mathmetician. You just can't.

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