- Typography (along with layout) is one of the two basic elements of design.
- You currently cannot pick a typeface for your website without using graphics. Many excellent designs therefore use images for all headings.
- Domestic broadband has reached up to 80% penetration in some countries. It is over 50% in many countries. In commercial organizations it has a much higher penetration. Jakob Nielsen says, “100KB is certainly a reasonable page weight for fast downloads” in ‘Proritizing Web Usability’ (p. 87).
- TrueType fonts range in size from about 10KB to about 100KB (gzipped even smaller). Most web pages carry images that are of similar size.
- CSS 2.0 defines the @font-face command that explains how a user agent should download a font where required.
- @font-face was removed from CSS 2.1 because of a lack of support in existing user agents. (No major web browser implements it apart from support limited to .eot files in Internet Explorer). It is back in CSS 3.0.
- It is a Mozilla FAQ to ask why Firefox doesn’t support downloadable fonts. But the reply concerns unicode and support for non-Latin characters rather than design/typographical issues. Nonetheless, support for @font-face does not seem to be on the Mozilla roadmap.
- Support for downloadable fonts is not the only thing needed to bring print-like type to the web. Current screen resolutions of 72dpi are much less than the 300 dpi or much more of the printed page.
Does anyone know why implementing @font-face seems to be such a low priority for makers of web browsers?