Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
but certainly a website should provide its own webfonts rather than link to privacy abusing Google fonts.
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That's the important bit. I've a lot of sites using CMS and 3rd party themes. It's a pain editing those themes to stop them using external fonts. I know how to install fonts on my own sites but so far I have not needed to. I check what the sites are like on phone, tablet and PC and on PC vary window size. I think a fail by big media sites that they serve separate mobile & desktop versions based on Browser info rather than screen size, so I prefer so-called Responsive themes. Best simply no fixed layout, true flowing, but a theme that replaces visible menu items with hamburger drop down and moves extra columns to inline automatically for a small screen is a good compromise.
Arrogant is a bit strong, but pale grey text on white or dark grey on black is stupid. And there are a lot of pointless Site Served fonts. Simple is always better as it's the content that counts, not how pretty a first glance is.
Also the default fonts on most systems are not that bad now compared with 1994.
There is a lot of fancy stuff done on printed novels that simply detracts from reading, like over decorated page numbers, headers, footers, drop caps and/or small caps at start of chapters, over decorative scene breaks instead of extra top margin/padding on the paragraph, ~ or * * *.
Then it gets really stupid when publishers try to exactly copy this in an ebook. It detracts from ability to read smoothly and some or all doesn't work on ereaders and apps.
So even if using embedded fonts in an ebook or server fonts on a web page I make sure the ebook still works on an app or reader that either doesn't support embedded fonts at all, or might have that turned off. I'll check a webpage with bits blocked by uMatrix that it is still readable and mostly works. Sites that give a blank page unless 3rd party scripts are enabled are nasty and 3rd party scripts are a security risk; they have been used on CNN and BBC to serve malware.
I don't explicitly block adverts (images, text and a link served from same domain without a script is never blocked), but 3rd party scripts are blocked. Especially the spying tracking scripts on all those Social Media Icons. If you must, just put an image and a link as the SM supplied samples are evil!