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Comment by matteason | Hacker News Reader

MyFonts' licensing system effectively took down our entire website recently.

We have a font licenced for some number of pageviews (250,000 or whatever), and they track that via an @import in the CSS they give you which points to a URL on a subdomain of myfonts.net. Except they changed their licensing mechanism, didn't tell their customers and broke the subdomain the @import was hitting. It didn't fail immediately, just kept trying to load for ages, and so rendering was blocked and our pages didn't load. That was pretty frustrating.

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This sounds like the awkward middle.

You're "too professional" to use system or OFL fonts, so you need to license a commercial font.

Yet you're too small to just outright buy the perpetual license or have your own customized font (like most bigger companies have).

So you end up with checks notes a pay-per-view font and all the issues associated with that. Which in turn gave you a rather unprofessionally broken website.

This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.

It wasn't missing, it was slow.

Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.

Yes, better a fallback than to completely block.

This kind of thing is why I block all web fonts. I don't want to wait, and I don't want the page to reflow while I'm reading it. The best way to do that is to use the system fonts (which also happen to be nice, on a Mac).

This is why—if I can—I design my sites using OS fonts that are honestly quite good.

> Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives?

It makes me angry that this is even a sentence. Call me an old fart but I really felt that the web lost the thread when this became a concern. Websites shouldn't be magazines. Typography and layouts are nice to have, but the first priority should be information and content.

But then the marketing people got involved and it had to become part of the "brand experience". Just give me a HTML table with your menu items, description, and prices. Or even better just the data in an XML file and I can read it without JavaScript and animations and awkward navigation patterns.

> Websites shouldn't be magazines.

Why though? We’re in 2023 and magazines got out of print to move to the web. Telling literal magazines “no, you shouldn’t exist here” is pretty harsh.

But I’ll grant you the mental image is powerful. I imagine you going to a restaurant and shouting “what’s with the decorum ? And that background music ? and all this space between tables ? this should be a warehouse with everyone sitting on the floor with the lasagna served in tupperwares ”

I'm happy to chose to have an experience, frankly I enjoy fine dining. But I refuse to go if I can't get access to the prices beforehand. There is a difference between an authentic experience (say the opera) and using it as a manipulative tactic. Do not get between me and the information. If I call an ask how much the lobster bisque is, don't tell me to hold while they get ahold of someone who can say it with a French accent. This is about empowering the consumer.

And even in a traditional magazine the design should never take precedence over the content. (...waiting for the Marshall McLuhan apologist to show up). I mean there is a reason that CSS is not necessary to render HTML or why Progressive Enhancement was a real movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Great analogy with the calling a restaurant!

Lets say instead of telling you to hold while they get a person with a french accent on the phone, they only pay people with french accents to answer the phone. There are a little less people with french accents working at the restaurant, but still enough to get the phone answered with only a slight delay compared to a more traditional restaurant phone line. There's also a special 'no fuss' mode on your phone, where you can just chat with the phones default voice assistant. There's no waiting time, and the voice assistant fetches the correct data from the restaurants website and presents it conversationally.

Of course, if all of the people with french accents called in sick for work, the phone might end up unanswered. The problem should be able to be fixed, though, by having some sort of fallback mechanism to people with italian accents.

> This is about empowering the consumer.

This is about what they want to deliver the customer and wether the customer chooses to receive it or not. Some restaurants will not explain you over the phone how much any single dish costs, and they might not want you or me as their customer.

Some won’t have a price for the lobster in the first place, and they’ll tell you how much to pay after you spent the night there. And some absolutely not fancy restaurants won’t even know if there will be lobster the day you go there nor how much they’ll price it.

But in any of these cases, it’s an experience the customer chooses. You can choose to never deal with a place that won’t let you spreadsheet your dinner cost beforehand, or never go to a site that takes more than 1s to fully load, or never allow a site to set a custom font etc.

You’re free to hang up while they go fetch a French accent guy. In the meantime, some other customers already knew the prices but still called just to hear the French accent guy talk to them for 5 minutes and will wait however long to get their fix.

So yes, I’m all for varied and clunky experiences as long as it’s a two way street and no scamming is involved. The web is wide enough to give some small place to all of it.

Ａ different angle: when moving from paper to the web, a lot was lost and a lot was gained. As you point out information has been the core pillar of the web since the dawn of it, and we thrived with that mindset.

But at some point I think we need to find a way to bring onboard part of what was left aside, all the stuff were information was not the primary value. Sure not all of it was great, but there should be technical ways to guarantee it’s delivered as fast as it can and as complete as the makers wishes.

I’m imagining a small kid opening the next Lego movie promotion site, and sure they’ll want to know when and where they can watch it, but the first step is to bring them in-universe and persuade them they want to watch the movie in the first place. Bare naked Arial text with no background for 4s won’t help in that respect, could probably be worse than a blank loading page for some kids, so the question really is how to make the actual intended experience work better (how do we solve the font licensing problem? Or how do we make sure to deliver a French Accent menu over the phone without the wait time, to get back to your analogy).

Then just put a PDF on the website and be done with it.

edit: and it seems we can't make magazines on the web anyway so there's also that.

edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ?

This gives me flashback of the Apple attempt at crack this nut. PDFs, PDFs everywhere.

> edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ?

The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.

> The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.

Oh but I have been out of that restaurant 5 minutes after I noticed nobody was doing anything related to food. They don't need to microwave the lasagna.

If you believe in an open web, there is no reasonable assumption that the stuff you value should receive any special consideration and all values should find the representation that people at large ascribe to them.

It's entirely reasonable for someone else to value different stuff than you do. If a vendor breaks a things, it's entirely reasonable for the customer to be frustrated by that in every case, no matter the thing.

What you (or I) think of the thing, is entirely beside the point when discussing its breakage, and the fact that people do not seem to get behind this causes too much frustration in the world.

I think a better approach is to use the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) to create and force websites to provide the relevant information in a standardised and accessible formats. You can do what you want, but substance before style.

I'm not talking about a brand experience necessarily. Just a mixture of paragraphs and images can cause the issue of where to put the scroll position after the text has changed size. Then add tables, different ways to layout images, etc.

No, you are going to give it a short window of time to deliver and if that elapses give up and render with what you have. You are going to keep trying to source the material in the background and if it eventually arrives give the user some non-intrusive feedback that they can choose to reload the page if they want to see it in its full form.

Wouldn't some of the font-display options be helpful for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

Here's some more information: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/font-display/

No. It's not about the font loading, it's about the CSS import loading.

Uhhh. What? When was this? That's weird to hear about, because I use them on a variety of monitored sites and haven't encountered any issues.

Interesting. I wonder if a cache like cloudflare could have reduced those impressions.

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