[FM Discuss] can someone explain this to me

[Tomas A. Krag]

Adam,

 From what I understood, when i looked into it late last year, the issue 
with the pure CSS3 implementation is that it has pretty shabby browser 
support, or at least requires some custom code to make it work in most 
modern browsers. The google font API on the other hand should work 
across the board.

Another, possibly minor detail is that if a lot of sites use the same 
source for their fonts (i.e. google API) then a lot of clients will 
already have the fonts cached, allowing for faster rendering.

Now whether those advantages are worth sacrificing openness and 
standards-compliance for, is another matter entirely.

On the other hand, the google API seems like a reasonable stop-gap until 
browsers catch up with proper CSS3 (in much the same way google offered 
offline support in gears until HTML5 caught up). I wonder what they'll 
do if and when that happens?

cheers

/Tomas

On 2011-02-15 16:12, adam hyde wrote:
> hey
>
> is anyone out there across the google font api?
> http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/google-font-api-guide/
>
> any idea why google is making an API to do what CSS3 *already* does...
> http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/
>
> is this a bit wonky or am i missing something?
>
> will we one day have a google html api? just a few calls to google appi
> and taddda!...no more need for html or css or... or am i just getting a
> little paranoid after writing the open web book? anyone want to give me
> a reality check?
>
> adam