It uses the Ampersand font for the whole of h1, yet only the ampersand is rendered dramatically; I think that was what was intended to show.

unicode-range for Firefox 3.5 works when I tested it via this demo site: http://opentype.info/webfont-demo/ampersand/

This is no test for the unicode-range feature. The example might also work without it.

Also, the same-origin rule works for absolute URLs as long as the domain.tld are the same

Can’t cofirm that.

Also, the same-origin rule works for absolute URLs as long as the domain.tld are the same ^_^ It’s currently how my sites are setup (for testing purposes).

It doesn’t yet work in FIreFox that I can figure out

Like I said in the article: You need to use relative links to the fonts, not absolute.

http://tr.im/emj?elliottcable

It is easy enough to create separate CSS font-family descriptors for separate alphabets and tag the text accordingly whenever an alphabet changes.

Sure, but the beauty of the unicode-range descriptor is, that it works automatically. Not everyone who creates web content, knows how to set languages tags. (e.g. millions of webloggers)

BTW: This sounds like a nice project for FontLab: a Webfont converter. The tool would take an OTF/TTF file and would output an EOT file (with URL binding), a splitted OTF/TTF (based on the supported Unicode ranges in the fonts) and a CSS file to combine all these files.

I think efficient font subsetting is important, but it does not require the unicode-range descriptor. It is easy enough to create separate CSS font-family descriptors for separate alphabets and tag the text accordingly whenever an alphabet changes.

It is not overly elegant but sometimes is a good idea anyway — for example if one wishes to use a different typeface or different typographic parameters for the portions of the text set in a different alphabet, or even just mark up a different XML “lang” attribute (for purposes of spelling and hyphenation control).

Since an alphabet switch constitutes directionality change (when mixing LTR and RTL writing systems) and usually also an OpenType run break, there are hardly any downsides for marking up a character set change using XML/HTML.

Of course one would not necessarily want to create the subsets based on the ancient codepages but on some more intelligent small character sets.

Adam