After reading this article, I decided to see how much the font tag could potentially cost a website.
I got curious to know actual numbers as to what css could save you in
regards to bandwidth. Keep in mind, this is probably wrong :P so
don't take it as scientific fact. Alls I did was save the html from
Yahoo.com as it stands today, then saved another version under a
different name
http://www.codecube.net/demos/css/yahoo.html and
http://www.codecube.net/demos/css/yahoonofont.html
Getting rid of the font tags was simple as I simply did a simple regexp replace in Dreamweaver MX to nuke all font tags ... I
didn't pull an eric meyer and restyle it using css, perhaps another day. However, here's what I
found.
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122 font elements found
with font page size = 26.32kb
without font page size = 22.73kb
font tags = 3.59k of bloat
10,000 hits = 35,900kb of font transfer
assuming they only get 10k hits a day (I'm sure it's much more) ...
that's roughly 1,077,000kb a month. That's almost a gig of extra
transfer allocated to the font tag.
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Of course, that doesn't take into account the extra size styling it
would add, but as many have stated before, a linked css file will be
downloaded once and cached. again, this was not a scientific study, feel free to check my numbers
... I used mozilla to deduce the page size. I was going to do
download times also, but couldn't because of the cache (don't use
mozilla often so I couldn't figure out how to clear it).
Joel Martinez