GoKawiilfont-family recommendations Draft: started 2026-05-09 •
A quick draft I jotted down. Been meaning to for years. I’ll finish it at some point. Trouble is, then I keep changing my mind on the shape.
1. Never assume that a named font will work There are no web-safe fonts; none are available across all major platforms. Web fonts ( @font-face and all) are not safe either: If not inlined, subresources can fail to load for all kinds of network reasons.
Font loading is an area of concern for security, so some block it for safety.
uBlock Origin has a dedicated button for disabling remote fonts.
I think some browsers’ data-saving modes block fonts from loading.
(And those that don’t, should.) Or the user might have elected not to let websites choose their own fonts. I’ve been doing that since 2020, and it makes the web so much better. For me, generic families are the only ones that will work. One related JS thing: if you ever use document.fonts.load("1em my-web-font") ,
remember that it’s fallible: the promise it returns may be rejected.
I came across about four things in the six years 2020–2025 that broke for this reason
(and two of them were in 2025). Now for a couple of consequence of this. a) Always include monospace if you want the text monospaced I see this forgotten occasionally, since its lack doesn’t affect most people.
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