System fonts don’t have to be ugly, but web fonts aren’t as bad as you think either
“System fonts don’t have to be ugly /// Iain Bean”
I like this overview of system fonts you can use. Many of these are extremely capable and attractive fonts whose aesthetics and functionality are first rate.
But I also agree with this short statement that comes towards the end of the post:
Byte-for-byte, JavaScript is more expensive for the browser to process than the equivalently sized web font. When prioritising what to spend your performance budget on, remember that web fonts contribute to the beauty of your site. Tracking JavaScript does not.
For some reason the distinction between types of payloads is sometimes getting lost in the discussion. You see developers talk about using system fonts, use “blur hashes” and lazy-loading images, or even dropping images altogether all the while they are ratcheting up the JS payload.
Image decoding is multithreaded and often hardware accelerated.
Web fonts are rendered using tightly optimised code and are extremely cacheable, provided you use the correct HTTP and CSS settings.
And even CSS code that’s “slow” is still an order of magnitude faster than most website’s fast JS.
We need a sense of proportion in the bandwidth and performance debate and JS is proportionally much, much worse for performance than any other part of the web dev stack.
“Should I use functional or object-oriented programming? – Chelsea Troy”
Know the pros and cons to each approach and use them appropriately.
“UI Design Testing Tools I Use All The Time — Smashing Magazine”
“Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny - Blood Knife”
There has been a noticable rise in American puritanism over the last couple of decades.
“Chrome’s IndexedDB— from best in class to the slowest - by David Fahlander - Mar, 2021 - Medium”
“On the myth of short life expectancy, and COVID complacency – Going Medieval”
“Daring Fireball: Google’s Search Results Have Gotten Worse”
Substantially worse in many cases.
“Around Paying for (and Charging for) Content - The Making of Making Sense”
“Forget SOLID. Say Hello To SHOC Principles for Modular Design. – Codemanship’s Blog”
“Speeding up often results in poor decisions that create future problems.”
Goes into way more depth on current state of bundling from a browser perspective than the simple title would imply. There aren’t many posts I’d describe as exhaustive but this one is.
“How many people subscribed to your RSS feed?”
Including subscriber count this way has been a tradition among feed reading services since before Google Reader IIRC.
“How I set up Glyphhanger on macOS for optimizing and converting font files for the Web”
“Why I close PRs (OSS project maintainer notes) - Jeff Geerling”
The comment thread on this post is a not-so-subtle demonstration as to why people tend to burn out.
“A Vision for Software Development: It’s All About Teams – Codemanship’s Blog”
“It’s just a pity the software itself was such a bad idea in the first place.”
“Effective Organizations Value Autonomy - Jacob Kaplan-Moss”
“TBM 8/52: Avoid Mono-Process (But Embrace Shared Language) - The Beautiful Mess”