for site which language is chinese what should i choose @font-face or sIFR for custom fonts?

Question

for site which language is chinese what should i choose @font-face or sIFR for custom fonts? and which charset i should choose?

Any typography, license free fonts suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Personally I'd avoid font embedding for Chinese. The fonts are just so big, it's a lot to download. And there are more potential issues with different anti-aliasing modes: many CJK fonts are likely to render horribly with anti-aliasing off, and the default horizontal-only anti-aliasing of ClearType applies poorly to ideographs that weren't specifically designed for it, as they tend to have many near-horizontal lines (which Latin typically doesn't).

So I'd go with the image replacement for now.

The charset for any modern web application should be UTF-8. There may still occasionally be a need to encode to a legacy DBCS such as GB (maybe for sending mail to old mobile phones or some broken webmail services), but database content and normal web page serving should all be UTF-8.

Answer 2

This post goes into detail on how to use Chinese fonts in general:

http://www.kendraschaefer.com/2012/06/chinese-standard-web-fonts-the-ultimate-guide-to-css-font-family-declarations-for-web-design-in-simplified-chinese/

font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei New", "Microsoft Yahei", "微软雅黑", 宋体, SimSun, STXihei, "华文细黑", sans-serif;

She also mentions http://www.justfont.com/ which offers a way to use more non standard fonts.