Re: [css-fonts] Proposal for 'font-rendering' property

Tab Atkins wrote:

> At the last F2F, I introduced a proposal for a 'font-rendering'
> @font-face descriptor and property, for controlling the block/swap
> timeout behavior for downloadable fonts.

I think you're referring to the discussion at the October F2F in Santa
Clara [1]. Was there another discussion at the Sydney F2F?

> Today I wrote it up properly, at
> <http://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-font-rendering/>.  Please
> review, and tell me what you think.

What's different from the original posting and list discussion back in
October [2]?

I think the underlying problem here is that authors want to avoid
visually jarring in-between states shown while font resources download.
It would make more sense I think to first attack the causes of those states
rather than twiddling the transitions.

As Zach noted back in October [3], to initiate font loads earlier I
actually think having some form of load hint for downloadable fonts is
much more important than twiddling timeouts. Whether this is best
defined via a new descriptor for @font-face or via resource hints [4] is
an open question.

I'm relatively skeptical about this proposal in general, especially the
notion of author-defined font resource timeouts. Font resource loads are
initiated relatively late in the page load process when text is laid out
and font matching occurs. Twiddling the behavior of *intermediate*
rendering of pages is very dependent on how an implementation
prioritizes resource loads and performs progressive rendering of loaded
contents. How exactly would an author evaluate "120ms" vs. "3s" as a
timeout, given that the impact of those parameters across
implementations will *not* be consistent, especially in the case of mobile
connections?

As a user I'm also wary of giving authors a way to effectively override
a user agent's ability to show fallback content to the user in
situations where network connectivity is poor. This proposal gives
authors a way to mandate that user agents withhold text display until
font loads complete, rather than allowing user agents to display
fallback text or not based on network conditions. As any iPhone user on
a slow mobile connection can tell you, that's sometimes a complete
annoyance.

It would help to see more detailed examples of use cases for this
proposal. I've seen people discussing polyfills for CSS Font Loading
that try to control these transitions. It would be useful to see how
they fit with this proposal.

It would also really help the discussion to see specific use cases that
require different *timeouts* and swapping behavior. I'm aware that some
have proposed icon fonts as a use case for 'mandatory' but I think icon
fonts are a special case that don't actually require 'mandatory' since
they primarily use private-use codepoints for which fallback explicitly
does not occur.

Regards,

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

[1] Santa Clara F2F discussion
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Oct/0434.html

[2] Original www-style posting proposing 'font-rendering':
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Oct/0434.html
https://github.com/igrigorik/css-font-timeout/blob/patch-1/README.md

[3] Zach's font prefetch hint proposal
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Oct/0515.html

[4] Resource hints editor's draft
http://w3c.github.io/resource-hints/


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