21 On the subject of poor fonts in the examples

While I agree that the body fonts in the provided examples are terribly unfortunate, this does bring up the point that not all fonts are created equal. There are essentially two classes of fonts we need to be concerned about: title fonts, and body fonts.

For titles, having a large variety of fonts available is very desirable. Let me rephrase that. For titles, having a large variety of fonts available is very very desirable. Take a look at where image replacement or flash replacement is used today—it’s almost all in headings. It would also be used in logos, except for the fact that logos involve many more graphical elements as well, so people often don’t even bother, and just use straight-up images.

For body text, there’s a much more constrained set of forms. You can have a serifed font, you can have a Gothic font, you can have different x-heights (within reason). You cannot use terribly strange letter-forms for any long run of text, although you can use it for shorter runs (like summary quotes pulled from the man body of an article, for example.)

So, here we have a couple of different problems. For titles, there’s just nothing there right now—and I think that in the examples, the title fonts are used reasonably tastefully. The font used for titles contributes a lot to the immediate impact of a piece of work. And it is here that the low variety of font options is the biggest problem at the moment. Flash and image replacement stand for these, but if they could be avoided, it would be a boon.

For body text, the problem is different. Some commenters here have suggested that because the only fonts that have all of the international features people would like to use are those fonts that are already globally available, there’s no problem. In fact, I think this is just about the opposite of the truth. How many of the commonly installed fonts include the glyphs to render every item on this page of IPA symbols correctly? How many users have a font like Gentium , which provides a variant for handling more stacking of diacritics than most European languages require?

Having the ability to provide a font with a webpage increases your ability to handle support for special characters of all sorts. It doesn’t give you a single “universally supports everything you could possibly need� font, instead it gives you the option of providing alternative body fonts based on your own special needs. Do you have a blog for phoneticians who write primarily in English? Perhaps your blog should provide a font with good IPA support to all visitors. If somebody uses very unusual characters for an example (something in Ethiopic , for example), you probably won’t be providing it automatically—but if the need arises, you could add it to your site.

(And actually, that raises an important point: whatever fallback mechanism you might use for web fonts should allow a website to say “here are the fonts I want you to use� and also provide fallbacks for when the character doesn’t exist. Something to allow the phonetician site mentioned above to say “use this font by default, but here are some others to use in case of emergency�.)

Finally, if we assume that the reasons above are worthwhile reasons to introduce better font support for the web, we get to the idea that there are good reasons to use alternative body fonts. The fonts used in the examples are pretty awful, it’s true, but subtle differences in the geometries of a body font can make a huge difference in the feel of a publication. You can express differences between “official�, “informal�, “serious�, and “light� without leaving the realm of readability.

Are people likely to abuse this sort of feature? Sure. Will sites provide tools to help people avoid this? Absolutely. (Look at how much better the demonized livejournals are in the general case, compared to the purple-on-black-moving-starscape monstrosities of the early web, which didn’t even have livejournal.) Is this a reason to reject allowing better font support? Not as far as I can tell.

Do we need better font support for the web, both for general design and for special needs? Absolutely.

posted at 02:41 pm on August 28, 2007 by John Prevost

22 Mixed feelings

I used to think that automatic, CSS-based font downloading was a good idea because I was frustrated by the lack of choice. I have observed the development of various plug-ins like sIFR with the same barely concealed disdain I have always had for Flash, because I feel that web pages should be built purely from open web standards. 5 years ago, I would be the first to cheer the introduction of a properly supported font downloading standard.

As the entry barrier for creating web content has dropped lower and lower, the quality has fallen equally precipitously. For every slick and attractive “Web 2.0” site emerging, hundreds of ugly MySpace/Facebook/Whatever “sites” spring up that seem to turn back the clock to the dark days of web development in the mid ’90s. Animated GIFs and blinking text have been (partially) replaced by dozens of different media players.

So now I view any new web technology with a good deal of skepticism. We are now talking about giving these purveyors of web garbage access to a practically limitless number of fonts. It will certainly make life easier for proper web developers and designers, but it will also make the web messier because of the MySpace crowd. Dare we let this genie out of the bottle?

posted at 02:54 pm on August 28, 2007 by Simon Jessey

26 Untitled

This is going to be long one… How about taking an easy rout? How about asking Microsoft to add more new open source screen optimized fonts? They have emails and phone numbers, someone should just call them. If they do so, next morning we would have 70% of users having those fonts via Windows Update. MacOS X and all flavours of *nix would follow. Problem solved in a matter of a week.

posted at 03:36 pm on August 28, 2007 by Henrijs Seso

29 I totally agree

This idea has been rounding my head for quite some time. I can only say that I totally agree…
I wrote about that (among other concerns) in a post at my blog (http://electriblog.com/?p=48). I have also other concerns about how dependant we, designers, are of a few software companies, and the need for a free design movement similar to the free software movement, wich I expressed here: http://electriblog.com/?p=96
And to suppor this idea I’ve published a post (http://electriblog.com/?p=99#) I had parked for months, expecting a clear sign of change, wich I’ve just read in this article.
Kudos to you for expressing it in such a clear way and voicing this specific need of designers.
To all designers: Support free fonts and the Open Font Licence! Free the Type!!!

posted at 04:06 pm on August 28, 2007 by Damian Vila

30 Fallbacks

CSS has this; you provide fallbacks by specifying a comma-separated list of fonts. Web fonts do not alter this mechanism.

Right, but doesn’t that only fall back if the font itself fails to exist? The OP was referring to missing characters in an existing font.

posted at 05:15 pm on August 28, 2007 by Jay Levitt

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