Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

Kbar, why do you need "highly available" fonts when you can bundle them in your web site? If the web site is up, fonts will work, if not fonts won't be needed anyway.

Regarding caching, anyone knows how browsers cache content? I.e. if I host my own fonts and someone visits me, then visits another web site with same fonts.. are they retrieved from the cache or downloaded yet again? I'm guessing they are downloaded again which is unfortunate..

View on HN

> I'm guessing they are downloaded again which is unfortunate..

Which is exactly the reason to use a web font CDN like Google Fonts. I have Open Sans on my computer, and I'll redownload it again in a year when the cache expires. If each Wordpress blog started including their own copy, I'd have to redownload it each time.

AFAIK, the fonts are hosted as regular URLs with cache policies specified in HTTP headers. So, if you host your own fonts, and someone visits your site and someone else's site with the same fonts, they will download it twice (unless the other site's referring to your site in the URL). The browser doesn't know that they're the same font until after it downloads it (twice).

Fonts are a small subset of a site that makes a conscious decision to use a third-party font. There are many other resources being downloaded, which may or may not be duplicated. If the sites are revisited, they will be cached.

Safari doesn't deal well with web-loaded fonts. I have seen Safari load corrupted webfonts from cache even when turning on "Don't Use Cache for Anything" in the Developer Tools menu. ... so there's always that.

If they're not being loaded from the same url (e.g. from Google), then they're not the same fonts as far as the browser can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com