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Comment by clarkdave | Hacker News Reader

This is similar to how TypeKit serve their fonts. They wrote a blog post explaining their reasoning: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/08/11/better-web-font-loading-w...

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That post claims that fonts don't have a fallback mechanism for when a font fails to load, but fonts have had fallbacks for as long as we've had CSS:

    font-family: "Obscure Font", "Common Font", sans-serif;

I don't know the current state of things, but a failed font download used to result in blank/transparent text in some browsers, ignoring the fallback font.

From the linked page:

"The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability."

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