Why does IE8 only show @fontface locally? And can I do anything to fix it?
Apart from Firefox, which does exactly the opposite (and is therefore not a real problem), every compatible browser that I have tried is showing my @fontface locally and on the server. No problems there. IE8 happily shows it locally, but not on the server. It is fetching and using the CSS file that contains the @fontface.
I have used Fontsquirrel’s CSS (shown below). There is no difference between my local directory structure/files and the equivalent on the server. IE8 displays Fontsquirrel’s kits locally and displays the samples on Fontsquirrel’s website: just nothing from my server.
I can’t provide any links because I’m testing this in a private directory until I get it working.
In short, no. It doesn’t answer my question, which is why Fontsquirrel’s CSS (which clearly works OK generally) is fine locally in IE8 and fine when viewed from Fontquirrel’s website, but not fine at all in IE8 when it’s coming from my website.
That’s what Fontsquirrel used to use until recently (approx end of January). It now uses what I think is called the mo’ bulletproof method. Neither works in IE8 when I test it on the web; both work locally. I’ve been trying every common/recent method that gets promoted.
I’m becoming convinced that IE8 just hates my web server host.
I’ve had the chance to upload my files to another server and found that they worked fine, so it must something in my host’s server set-up that is stopping IE8 from fetching the font file. Something to sort out on another day…
Yes, this turned out to be a server-side problem. With trial and error, I traced it to some htaccess code that was written (by someone else—I’m not that clever!) to prevent malicious query string exploits.
Maybe that will help someone else to fix it if they get the same problem in the future.