media query for if a Google font won't load?

How exactly are you bringing in the google font? It sounds like you are using the @import method?

I prefer using the standard way, linking in their stylesheet, and then adding the font family to the text I want to style.

But you DEFINITELY want the font to still look good and fit correctly even if it's fallen all the way back to the web browsers default serif or sans-serif font.

If google decides to drop that font, or move it, or change it's name, or drop their font service all together, than your page will not look right. Don't rely on somebody else's service to make your site look good. It should still look good and function correctly even if all your plug-ins and styling updates break.

I'm linking to the stylesheet, but the link is external.

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Mr+Dafoe' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Then in my main stylesheet I've got:

h1 {
    font-family: "Mr Dafoe", "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;
}

Thanks for your input - what can I do? Can I change the font-size property based on what font it ends up using?

I see. I chose to fall back to sans-serif instead of cursive because the default cursive fonts all look crappy (Comic Sans or something similar to it). But I get that the problem comes from mixing font types.

I'll play around with other solutions, thanks for your help.

Yeah, dreamweaver kicked back the default fonts as being comic sans MS, than cursive, which just the font type cursive on my firefox is still comic sans ms...yuck.

On other idea, but it has a downside too.

I assume you're not writing a paragraph in this cursive font, just a title or headline or something? You could that text in as an image. The image of text should load very consistently, with the web file and image living on the same server, you're not depending on another outside service or plugin.

The problems are SEO, screenreaders, and what if the image doesn't load by chance. You can give the image of text an Alt tag of what it said. That will display if the image doesn't, it'll also help with SEO issues (although not a perfect solution). I don't know for sure if screen readers pick up alt tags or not. But you could add the same text in right before or after the image, and than give that text a huge text indent, like -9999px, which will keep it off of every screen, but a screen reader should still pick it up since it is in your code.

Good luck whatever you decide to do. It's ultimately up to you!