Preload Hints For Web Fonts (bramstein.com)
almost 8 years ago from Philip Crown
almost 8 years ago from Philip Crown
I swear the last three articles I've seen about web font performance have loaded like this:
Thats cringeworthy. However, if you look at the source code, the page is not using the technique described in the post. It is using https://typekit.com/, which is probably what most blogs use nowadays. And thats not a bad thing. Blog is just a medium to share thoughts. It is not supposed to implement every thought/technical architecture it describes.
It's better than the alternative, FOIT, where the text goes invisible until the font is loaded. On mobile and spotty connections, the time the text is invisible is more noticeable—sometimes several seconds to indefinitely.
Painful, sure, but I appreciate that the fonts aren't blocking render. I don't have the stomach to do it on my own properties
Me waiting for HTTP2 to get standardized so we can eliminate these issues entirely and focus on bigger problems.
I hope we get this soon, or at the very least a polyfill.
Is this even something a polyfill could do in the mean time?
I still wonder why there's a simple solution to counter this issue so far. This pushed me to try a few web font providers to see who can do better and so far Google Web Fonts seem to be better in terms of that (ugly!) lag. TypeKit and FontDeck's javascripts are considerably laggy to give me a headache. Are we on 2015 or what?
I don't disagree that would help, but there are numerous issues at play here.
Being able to customize the delivery of these fonts at a more granular level would be good. Typography.com sending me a bunch of huge data-uri is kind of a bummer for performance.
At our current state of internet speeds, allowing for more concurrent steams would help assets fetching/download (for desktop anyway). Http2 allows for unlimited concurrent steams by default vs ~8 we can do now. (from what I understand anyway)
Typography.com sending me a bunch of huge data-uri
That's their crappy anti-piracy measures. They are happy to have your site be slow so long as their precious fonts don't get stolen. It totally sucks.
Http2
Ideally, yes.
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