Is there such a thing as a web-safe font?
highperformancewebfonts.com
highperformancewebfonts.com
Today when I want to change the font, I just add a per-site StyleBot rule.
HTML went way too far IMO, trying not only to represent the structure of information, but ALSO trying to solve the layout problem.
It will never happen, but I long for a web where layout and content are disassociated. Where content is structured, requested by clients, delivered by servers, and then the client chooses the layout. Blind? Terminal only? Compute limited? No problem, use an agent that works for you.
But big content wants CONTROL. They want to control what you see, how you see it, and what the preconditions are. They also want the web to be an application platform (that they can control, of course, and not have to deal with Apple or Google or Microsoft) that is free to them and supports all their controls.
<rant/>
A lynx for the modern age?
font-family: 'system-ui', sans-serif;
System fonts and font rendering are now so good for readability, that you don't need anything else. I use it on one website where I don't care about pixel-perfect. In cases where the customer/owner wants a pixel-perfect layout, this will not work.
This would be like how early versions of PostScript came with about 30 standard fonts available to all PostScript printers.
Even just focusing on Latin scripts, a few hundred fonts would roughly double the compressed download size for browsers and Electron apps.
It might be possible to come up with a better compression scheme which exploits redundancy between different typefaces, but as far as I know, that tech doesn't exist yet.
And then, once you have that system-provided codepoint coverage, you can make your font parametric in order to avoid needing to ship multiple copies of the font for different styles. It's not a perfect solution, but it's still pretty acceptable given the constraints.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems#/media...
Variable fonts would help, but I don't think it would be enough, especially if the goal is to provide a wide selection of fonts.
you are hereby cursed to use papyrus to code and you will be forced to drive an AMC Gremlin until you appreciate the value of visual design
It's unfortunately not at all startling, not on Hackernews. People here have the worst case of being good at one thing (usually software/systems/databases or similar) and assuming this means that they know more about everything else than everyone else, that I've ever seen in an online community.
I think it's called Neil Degrasse Tyson syndrome.
I recently had to pay for parking online (already an annoyance) because the kiosk was broken. That one transaction used like 3% of my data for the month. Why does it take dozens of megabytes to ask for a credit card number, license plate number, and lot id? Please just send me a single 500 byte form with some inputs. I'm not on your site to be entertained. It doesn't need to be a SPA. It needs an "enter your info" page and a "thank you" page.
Last week I shipped a few updates to one of my sites and completely ignored @ndriscoll's UI/UX guidelines. Can you believe it?
Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web".
Do you even have them written in some document we can easily read/share? Or is going through your entire history of HN comments to figure out your arbitrary preferences expected as well?
If they're feeling particularly adventurous, they could spend another hundred bytes on the Luhn algorithm in javascript to validate one of the two inputs. Or they could do it only on the server. It doesn't make much difference.
The problem is that the web designers are the ones "forcing everybody to comply" with their FONT choice and downloading all that font data. Keep the self-centered trait applied to the correct party please ;-)
Of course the next thing I “should” do is to “learn css”, which is a steaming pile of crap that makes no sense and is barely generalizable even with a few megabytes of any reasonable “framework”, which usually still uses non-css-compiled-to-css sources and multiple auxiliary tools to add polyfills and browser specifics. No desktop framework I worked with required so much tuning and fixing and adjusting just to look normal-ish.
So no. “You wanted 500 bytes? Too bad, here bootstrap.css.”
Those responsible for it should fix this effing pile of shit that they call “browser layout and boxing model” then I’ll think about the few-kilobytes range.
Be glad your parking garage didn't have its own app.
Never let the user design their own interfaces. Users have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
The right answer is for browsers to provide knobs for a user that would control relative brightness, contrast, saturation, boldness, fluffiness, comicness, sharpness, height, width, line spacing, and so on. Per browser and then per-site adjustments. A simple sidebar or a drawer.
In the real world, designers will just plaster all webpages with images to replicate the fonts they aren't allowed to use. SVG sprites, anyone? :(
It's surprising that this is never the actual discussion we have, but it's always a discussion of web safe fonts vs custom fonts.
Then again, while browsers and OSes are already pretty big size wise, fonts wouldn't exactly make that better. On the other hand, they already include a whole bunch of fonts, so having some authority delegate what should be available everywhere wouldn't be inconceivable.
One attempt by Microsoft:
I have long decided to skip web fonts altogether and go with a) Georgia and b) a fallback font stack that suggests a couple of similar alternatives that are common across operating systems and falls back to standard defaults.
There, you have it, and it's perfect.