Not sure if that was a joke or not, but this problem has already been solved in CSS (@font-face). Though the downside to that would be that they'd then have the issue of hosting copyrighted content (ie the typeface).
True, but equally not all browsers support images either (lynx, elinks, etc). Which is probably about the same market share as browsers that don't support custom typefaces these days. And at least custom typefaces would still leave you with a readable text on non-supported browsers - which is more than an image would (which also gives them added bonus of being easily programmatically parseable, eg by web crawlers).
Why on earth was that voted down? It wasn't rude, spam, nor factually inaccurate.
I'm getting quite fed up with people who abuse their negative karma privileges. I mean, at least justify your peer moderation with a follow up comment when the reason for the penalty is as ambiguous as it is in this instance.
I excepect I'll just get down voted again though, for daring to have a rant about people who do "hit and run" down voting...
...and once again you've failed to specify why it was wrong. Simply stating something to be wrong is a worthless comment. Provide an reason; or citation if it's necessary. I'm open to correction if you can provide a counter argument.
@font-face is not a solution that works 100% of the time.
I'm not sure how to back that up, it's a basic fact.
Someone was being cheeky about ensuring comic sans. You replied by 'correcting' them with something that wouldn't in fact ensure comic sans. It was wrong and not particularly useful, and it had a good amount of missing-the-joke, so it got downvoted.
I didn't say it works 100% of time. (See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8832776) and I did say that I wasn't sure if that was a joke or not from the offset (text isn't always easy to judge sarcasm)
So basically what you are saying is you down voted me because you misread my post (and frankly, even if I did categorically state what you thought I said, I still think your reason would have been somewhat petty)
This is why people shouldn't down vote without leaving a reply first. :)
>I didn't say it works 100% of time. (See my other comment
When you reply to 'ensures' then by default you are talking about ensuring. There are plenty of ways for hosted fonts to fail, even in supported browsers. And when you talk about fallbacks with 'at least' you have missed the point that an image format is comic sans or bust, never an inferior font.
>I did say that I wasn't sure if that was a joke or not
Being aware that you missed a joke doesn't make a joke-missing comment better.
>This is why people shouldn't down vote without leaving a reply first. :)
So you can pedantically argue about being right rather than accept that your comment wasn't as helpful as you thought? Seems like a net negative to me.
>somewhat petty
I suppose. It depends on whether you think downvotes are necessarily a rebuke.
>So basically what you are saying is you down voted me because you misread my post
I didn't downvote you. What an unfortunate misreading. ;)