As always, I think the custom font hate is overstated.
> Custom fonts are a waste of bandwidth
Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much. For comparison, it's unlikely you'll see blog authors get up in arms over a single PNG.
> they come with one of three evils called latency, FOUT, and FOIT
A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be addressed by exactly what the author links in their footnote.
Humorously, the author's own site is committing some sins here: both of two font files are >140kb, they don't have gzip on, and they have the fonts marked `font-display: block`. They could cut their CLS and LCP by almost 100% by addressing this: https://i.imgur.com/MOl32iS.png
Of course, it's already very fast, by virtue of having no other resources loading. This would be dramatically worse if there were scripts that needed to get downloaded.
> Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much.
Agreed. Make your own custom font files with only the characters you use, or are likely to use.
> A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be addressed by exactly what the author links in their footnote.
Browsers will wait for about 3 seconds for custom fonts to load before showing a fallback font.
> both of two font files are >140kb, they don't have gzip on
woff2 format fonts are already compressed, so gzip won't do much.
> Browsers will wait for about 3 seconds for custom fonts to load before showing a fallback font
Depends on the `font-display` value on one's `@font-face`, which is where the author's choices of "latency, FOUT, and FOIT" comes from. For instance, Google Fonts uses `swap` by default, meaning the fallback shows right away: https://web.dev/font-best-practices/#choose-an-appropriate-f... (I also think Safari's `auto` font-display never shows fallbacks, but that may have changed)
That's often enough. You can go another step further and preload the font, which I generally recommend. This especially helps if the font is otherwise discovered late by the browser.
> Custom fonts are a waste of bandwidth
Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much. For comparison, it's unlikely you'll see blog authors get up in arms over a single PNG.
> they come with one of three evils called latency, FOUT, and FOIT
A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be addressed by exactly what the author links in their footnote.
Humorously, the author's own site is committing some sins here: both of two font files are >140kb, they don't have gzip on, and they have the fonts marked `font-display: block`. They could cut their CLS and LCP by almost 100% by addressing this: https://i.imgur.com/MOl32iS.png
Of course, it's already very fast, by virtue of having no other resources loading. This would be dramatically worse if there were scripts that needed to get downloaded.