Re:Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
by jeroenhd on Saturday September 17, 2022 @05:19AM
(#32876052)
Most developers suck at design but most designers suck at development.
If your designer can't make your website work well with one of the hundreds of fonts preloaded on my machine, I don't know what to tell you. If your website looks like crap because your designer couldn't come up with a good fallback font that's still on the designer.
It's like "web colours" all over again. Web designers should work within the constraints of the user agent or they shouldn't design for the web, and one of those constraints is that the font doesn't always look exactly like the designer wants it to look. It's called a user agent for a reason, these days more and more because the source it's rendering is as anti-user as can be.
I have web fonts turned off because I'm sick of text shifting because the particular Arial-but-not-really font a website insists on got loaded in. I've also occasionally had to use reader mode because the "design" was very fancy but practically unreadable.
If your designer can't make your website work well with one of the hundreds of fonts preloaded on my machine, I don't know what to tell you. If your website looks like crap because your designer couldn't come up with a good fallback font that's still on the designer.
It's like "web colours" all over again. Web designers should work within the constraints of the user agent or they shouldn't design for the web, and one of those constraints is that the font doesn't always look exactly like the designer wants it to look. It's called a user agent for a reason, these days more and more because the source it's rendering is as anti-user as can be.
I have web fonts turned off because I'm sick of text shifting because the particular Arial-but-not-really font a website insists on got loaded in. I've also occasionally had to use reader mode because the "design" was very fancy but practically unreadable.