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There are a few reasons why smiley is a better solution: Webkit+Font Management software can mess up local references, like turning glyphs into A blocks.  (crbug.com/33173) On OS X, Font Management software may alter system settings to show a dialog when trying to access a local() font that's accessible outside of Library/Fonts. More detail on my bulletproof post. (crbug.com/29729) Font Explorer X is also known to mess up other stuff in Firefox: bugzil.la/531771 Although it's unlikely, you could reference a local() font which is completely different than what you think it is. (Typophile post on different fonts, same name) At the very least its a risk, and you're ceding control of the type to both the browser and host machine. This risk may not be worth the benefit of avoiding the font download. These are all pretty edge case issues, but it's worth considering. FontSquirrel has already made the smiley syntax the new default in the Generator, and you should use it going forward as well.

@font-face { font-family: 'Graublau Web'; src: url('GraublauWeb.eot'); src: local('?'), url('GraublauWeb.woff') format('woff'), url('GraublauWeb.ttf') format('truetype'); }

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced.

Many web sites fall in the middle of these metrics. For these sites, the best solution generally is to deploy the JavaScript and CSS as external files. The only exception where inlining is preferable is with home pages, such as Yahoo!'s front page and My Yahoo!. Home pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times. For front pages that are typically the first of many page views, there are techniques that leverage the reduction of HTTP requests that inlining provides, as well as the caching benefits achieved through using external files. One such technique is to inline JavaScript and CSS in the front page, but dynamically download the external files after the page has finished loading. Subsequent pages would reference the external files that should already be in the browser's cache.