The “font-display: optional” looks quite interesting, and I’ll keep that in mind for projects, but I don’t think most websites would care for it. If they really did, they’d first chop off massive JavaScript and images first.
Compressed font formats aren’t typically as heavy as these kinds of resources. One could also optimize the font file size by choosing only the characters used by the website and getting rid of the rest.
> The fallback-to-custom-font matching works really well in most cases.
The article goes on to note that this is an approximation and that it doesn’t work well for all cases. I looked at the comparison screenshots, and while the text size and wrapping may be close enough, it’s quite different in terms of readability.
Websites may choose certain fonts for better readability and to better show the content structure and hierarchy. Whatever the reason, there is a specific set of preferences that the website author chose (especially if they decided to use custom fonts). That gets lost with generated substitutions like this.
It may be a good idea to spend a little time to decide, by hand, which fallbacks are good enough (which most websites do by including system defaults in the list, even a generic sans serif or serif). That way, the website’s look is still under your control in a better way (as the designer and/or developer).
Compressed font formats aren’t typically as heavy as these kinds of resources. One could also optimize the font file size by choosing only the characters used by the website and getting rid of the rest.
> The fallback-to-custom-font matching works really well in most cases.
The article goes on to note that this is an approximation and that it doesn’t work well for all cases. I looked at the comparison screenshots, and while the text size and wrapping may be close enough, it’s quite different in terms of readability.
Websites may choose certain fonts for better readability and to better show the content structure and hierarchy. Whatever the reason, there is a specific set of preferences that the website author chose (especially if they decided to use custom fonts). That gets lost with generated substitutions like this.
It may be a good idea to spend a little time to decide, by hand, which fallbacks are good enough (which most websites do by including system defaults in the list, even a generic sans serif or serif). That way, the website’s look is still under your control in a better way (as the designer and/or developer).