My pages are not slow and tend to be much smaller than the typical web
page out there.
The size of a woff2 file can vary greatly depending upon what characters
it covers and the complexity of those characters.
jQuery is only needed once as it should then be cached for a very long
time, and quite often is served from a CDN where the user does not need
to load it for each and every site they visit.
With fonts, many sites use at least three different families and often
several faces within those families, which is appropriate because many
characters are far more readable when a genuine font face is used rather
than fake italic or bold. The w character for example is often drawn
different and more readable in the italic variant of the family.
There are free fonts that also exist on CDNs but there are many to
choose from so it is less likely the user already has them cached even
if they are on a common CDN (e.g. Google Fonts), and many webmasters
license fonts that can't be on a common CDN due to the license.
There is a push for privacy reasons to limit a browsers ability to use
fonts from the system, access to system fonts can be used for browser
fingerprinting. If that push is successful (and I hope it is) then web
font usage may increase due to the limited fonts that a particular
browser may ship with.
Allowing for genuine font faces (and fatter font faces) where bandwidth
isn't an issue but limiting the font faces (and using slimmer fonts)
where bandwidth is an issue can provide for a better user experience
when there are bandwidth constraints on the client.
A better experience for the end user under those fairly common
conditions (especially common in developing countries) I believe is a
worthwhile goal.
Web developers that don't want to or feel they don't need to accommodate
those users won't have to, but those who do want to take bandwidth
concerns into consideration will be able to.
I don't know how common it is, but it was a style sheet I saw in the
wild where the web developer was trying to use device-width to
accomplish that goal that made me think about a better way, because I do
believe taking bandwidth into consideration is a noble thing for a web
developer to do, and they shouldn't have to use device-width to try and
accomplish that.
In my opinion.
On 12/09/2016 08:09 AM, Yay295 wrote:
On another note, are you sure it's *font files* that are slowing down your
page load? Maybe I've just been lucky, but of the 24 font files I happen to
have in a folder on my computer, 19 of them are only about 50KB. That's
one-fifth the size of jQuery. Perhaps you should be looking at shrinking
your font files first if they're such a problem?
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Zuckerman <j.zucker...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Michael - I think "high" and "low" are very relative terms, defining those
terms for all users for all time doesn't seem possible. Also,
connectivity/bandwidth are subject to change at any moment during the
lifetime of a page. Current media queries like `max-height` or
`min-resolution` would respond to changes, have you thought about how your
proposed addition would behave?
Currently you can use javascript to figure out if the network will support
your enhanced experience (and you're free to define what that means) and
add a classname to the document to trigger the css rules for that
experience, so you can build the feature you're asking for using existing
parts. It's not baked into the platform, but because of the nature of the
web and vagueness of the requirements, I'm not sure it's possible to do any
better.
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 9:07 AM Michael A. Peters <mpet...@domblogger.net>
wrote:
This was inspired by inspection of a style-sheet in the wild that uses
screen-width to try and reduce bandwidth needs of mobile devices.
I like the concept, but very often I use my mobile devices where
bandwidth doesn't matter and my laptop via a mifi where bandwidth does
matter.
I would like a CSS media query for bandwidth so that I can reduce how
many webfonts are used in low bandwidth scenarios. It seems browsers are
already smart enough to only download a font defined by @font-face if
they need it, so it only needs to be done where the font is used, e.g.
pre {
font-family: 'monoFont-Roman', monospace;
}
pre em {
font-family: 'monoFont-Italic', monospace;
font-style: normal;
}
pre strong {
font-family: 'monoFont-Bold', monospace;
font-weight: normal;
}
pre em strong {
font-family: 'monoFont-BoldItalic', monospace;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
}
pre strong em {
font-family: 'monoFont-BoldItalic', monospace;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
}
@media screen and (device-bandwidth: low) {
pre strong {
font-family: 'monoFont-Roman', monospace;
font-weight: 700;
}
pre em strong {
font-family: 'monoFont-Italic', monospace;
font-weight: 700;
}
pre strong em {
font-family: 'monoFont-Italic', monospace;
font-weight: 700;
}
}
That right there cuts the number of fonts the low-bandwidth device needs
in half, and could have even gone further and used fake italic if the
fake italic for the font looks good enough.
The small increase in CSS file size doesn't matter with high bandwidth
clients and is justified for low-bandwidth as it reduces the content
that needs to be fetched.
It would be up to the client to define the device-bandwidth, web
developers should create the CSS for high bandwidth and only have the
alternate CSS kick in when a media query says it is low.
Honestly I think low or high are the only definitions needed with low
being the only one that a site should have conditional styles set for.
-=-
The same concept could be applied to html5 media too. e.g. I could serve
the 64 kbps opus to clients that don't define themselves as low, and the
32 kbps opus to clients that do define themselves as low.
How to handle media in situations where a service worker pre-fetches
content I haven't thought about, because a client may pre-fetch content
before the bandwidth constraint changes, but I suspect there's a clever
solution to that (e.g. always fetch high bandwidth when async pre-fetch
and then use high bandwidth when cached even if in low bandwidth mode)
But html5 media can be figured out later, CSS is what I really would
like to see a bandwidth media query for.
Thoughts?
