| > Why hasn’t w3c taken on some way to avoid the unnecessary complexity? They did. Your browser will use the fall back when you use "font-family" selector. But that's just the best the CSS spec can offer. Why? Because the problem isn't a browser problem. It's a system level problem. Operating systems only come with a handful of fonts. And those packs of fonts may differ per OS. Moreover, most fonts are protected by intellectual property rights. Helvetica isn't a free-to-use font. It's IP is currently owned by a company called Monotype Imaging. It was originally licensed to Apple, Xerox and Adobe for use. That's why Microsoft came up with Arial. [1] > It was created to be metrically identical to the popular typeface Helvetica, with all character widths identical, so that a document designed in Helvetica could be displayed and printed correctly without having to pay for a Helvetica license. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial If you want to use a font that isn't part of your OS, you basically have two options. Either you download a font published under a copyleft license; or you buy a license if it's a commercial font. Suppose you want to use a commercial font in your website, simply adding it through font-face could be a violation of the IP license. You really want to read the fine print of the fonts you buy. Yes, companies and people do find themselves in protracted lawsuits over illegal font use. [2] [2] https://www.quora.com/Do-companies-get-sued-for-using-fonts-... Before Google Fonts, adding a font via font-face was a protracted effort because of all this. You had to mess with font-face, and finding a nice, free-to-use font across various font foundries was hard and laborious. The big boon of Google Fonts is that it provides (a) a set of free-to-use fonts which are (b) quite well designed and widely used everywhere after a decade. (Just like Arial, Google's Roboto is widely popular.) [3] and (c) extremely convenient to use since it's just a single line of CSS. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roboto However, Google Fonts dominance on the Web only masks the underlying complexity of font management [4] and the legal issues of using and distributing commercial fonts that aren't designed by Google. [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_management_software So, the performance and privacy issues related to using Google Fonts are mainly a trade off people are willing to accept in order to not having to deal with this complexity. The old alternative is to use "web safe fonts" or "generic font families" which are presumably already available on the vast majority of machines via the operating system. Needless to say, this dramatically reduces the number of fonts designers can choose from. [5] [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_typography#Web-safe_fonts The other alternative is what the blogpost proposes: Download and host any font you use yourself. Provided that you do your own due diligence regarding rights management. |
Why is a web designer trying to choose fonts? The web is not a print medium.