Hi paulcobb,
Thanks for using Menu Social Icons! Can you please provide your site address so I can look at your site?
Paul
Paul,
Checked agin this morning and all now load fine.
That certainly wasn’t the case yesterday.
My layout was broken as the empty font area was larger than the loaded font and hence floats were screwed up.
I suspect it may have been an issue with the CDN but only affecting FF?
Would it be possible for ‘menu social icons’ to fall back gracefully if the fonts cannot be loaded succesfully?
Thanks,
Paul
Downtime wouldn’t effect only Firefox, and the most recent downtime I can see at NetDNA was in February.
Generally speaking, CDN’s are the most reliable resource hosting — partly because they only host static files (much more difficult to crash), and partly because they’re a distributed network (even when experiencing downtime, it may only be one region, or intermittent). I’d be more prone to suspect your local DNS or connection in the situation you’re describing (short duration, appearance of an outage).
The font styles can be replaced with a file from any location using wp_dequeue_style and wp_enqueque_style, but again, the CDN should be the most performant and reliable over anything else. (All online services experience downtime. Even Google.com!)
As far as a fallback, there are similar techniques available for scripts like jQuery, but I’ve not seen many people use similar techniques for webfonts. Webfonts can be detected with JavaScript, which would then be used to enable or disable a supporting stylesheet. Alternatively, fonts could be loaded completely with JavaScript, similar to the solution used by TypeKit.
It would take a skilled developer a bit of time to create that script, which then *might* protect against the edge case of the file not loading. The added complexity might also be complex enough to add more failures than it solves.
I created and support this plugin in my spare time, and unfortunately don’t see time to research and code this feature on my own soon. If you or another developer are interested in programming a system to avoid such an extreme case, pull requests are welcome on Github.
