Why your browser refuses to load that font

The page loads. The words are all there. But they are in the wrong typeface — a plain, default one — and the whole thing looks like a fax of itself.

The browser is not being difficult

A font is a file, and it usually lives on a different machine from the page that asks for it. Fetching something across that line requires the machine that holds the file to say, explicitly, that it is willing to hand it over. That permission is a header, and if nobody set it, the browser declines — quietly, and by design.

Why quietly

Because the alternative is worse. The rule that stops one site from reading another's files is the rule that stops the tab with your bank in it from being read by the tab with the crossword.

The three-line fix, and the reason it is not always applied

Somebody has to own the machine holding the font. On a newspaper's site, that is often a supplier, and the supplier's security team has a policy that predates the redesign.

So the front page goes out in the wrong typeface, and a ticket is opened.