On: Adobe Edge Web Fonts

[zalew]

    <script src="http://use.edgefonts.net/league-gothic.js"></script>

I wonder why they pushed negotiation to the client side instead of doing like google. you need to send this http://use.edgefonts.net/league-gothic.js to your user instead of this http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Code+Pro in order to serve your font, and it won't work with js disabled.

[relix → zalew]

TypeKit has a lot of countermeasures to ensure that the fonts are used according to the license, and not by anyone who isn't allowed to or through proxy's or something. I don't know the details but had a run-in with this in the past, resolved soon by customer support. I'm guessing Adobe didn't care for creating a second serving system to serve up these fonts, or the licenses are still restrictive that it requires some added logic.

[clarkdave → zalew]

This is similar to how TypeKit serve their fonts. They wrote a blog post explaining their reasoning: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/08/11/better-web-font-loading-w...

[JoshTriplett → clarkdave]

That post claims that fonts don't have a fallback mechanism for when a font fails to load, but fonts have had fallbacks for as long as we've had CSS:

    font-family: "Obscure Font", "Common Font", sans-serif;

[ricardobeat → JoshTriplett]

I don't know the current state of things, but a failed font download used to result in blank/transparent text in some browsers, ignoring the fallback font.

[goatforce5 → clarkdave]

From the linked page:

"The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability."

[genwin → zalew]

I abandoned Google fonts because of the annoying latency / flash on refresh. The Adobe fonts are smooth on my dev machine. That might be worth the difference under the hood.