On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
What I believe he's saying is that if a script is only used for a single interwiki link in a page, we shouldn't call a font for it.
If you try to view articles in that language, on the other hand, it will of course be reasonable to call a font.
Some computers would be downloading fonts for every page that had Georgian, Armenian, or Indic interwikis, I would imagine that would use a lot of resources far beyond what is necessary.
WebKit apparently blocks text rendering until all custom fonts have been downloaded. I'm not sure if it just avoids rendering the text in the custom font, or all text on the page -- if the latter, then we'd have to be *very* sparing with custom fonts. (Gecko has a FOUC effect instead: it renders with the fonts it has, and then re-renders when it gets the right ones. So that's less of an issue, although we don't want people downloading 20 fonts on every main page view in any event.)