In Wednesday’s 3.8 planning meeting we discussed hotlinking vs bundling Open Sans. MP6 followed Twenty Twelve’s example by linking to Google Webfonts, but the consensus from Wednesday’s chat was that bundling would be preferable.
I began experimenting with this last week; first determining which font formats were necessary to include. I settled on WOFF and SVG as the two formats that would cover every browser we’re aiming to support. I left out TTF and EOT as they add only marginal browser support (IE8), but would add significant weight to the WordPress download. We do include TTF and EOT versions of Dashicons, since loading those icons is essential to usability in a way that loading Open Sans is not.
The bundled Open Sans webfonts come from FontSquirrel. The Western Latin and Basic Latin subsets are small and include enough characters for English language support. Those subsets do not include a full set of glyphs for other languages, however (they’re available as separate downloads). There is a non-subsetted version of the font available which includes all necessary glyphs, but it’s 2x–2.5x the file size of the subsetted fonts, which add significant overhead to the pageload and can actually crash some mobile browsers. The Western Latin and Basic Latin subsets can cause missing characters (spaces or boxes) to appear in text using accented characters, which is a significant usability concern.
Google Webfonts solves both the character set and the font format problems by intelligently loading the font format and the character subset that’s needed for a particular browser and a particular website, and nothing more. For us to bundle Open Sans with WordPress, we need a way to accomplish that without adding significant heft to the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. WP download. I’m starting this P2 A free theme for WordPress, known for front-end posting, used by WordPress for development updates and project management. See our main development blog and other workgroup blogs. thread to open up the discussion on how we might do that.
#3-8, #fonts, #open-sans