Chris Manning takes us through the weird journey that is custom fonts on the web. We started with the “Flash of Unstyled Text”, which at first we didn’t like because it was abrupt and felt janky and could even cause reflow, which didn’t help readers focus. Browsers reacted, and started hiding text until the custom font was ready (various implementations did it differently). “Flash of Invisible Text” as it were. Times have changed such that FOUT is now preferable again, because at least you could read something immediately. Chris shows how you can get that back through various JavaScript methods.
New to me: the future holds native browser methods to give us more control. A font loading API and a CSS font-display property.