The website of Tate Johnson
"Welcome to tatey.com, the transmission belt for my random (and sometimes communist) propaganda. Please, grab a beer and poke around, you may even find something interesting – Cheers, Tate"
Web fonts anyone?
Posted in XHTML/CSS on Friday, 29th June 2007
Every website on the internet use the same fonts. Infact, they’re the same fonts we’ve been using since Microsoft released it’s “Core fonts for the web” in the mid 1990’s. If you’re a designer, and you’ve ever wanted to use a particular font. Too bad, you can’t; there’s no way to ensure that users will have your desired font installed. Thankfully you can degrade gracefully. However, the original style that the designer intended is lost.
Opera is apparently implementing support for “Web fonts” in an upcoming version of its browser. As apart of CSS3, designers and developers will be able to specify downloadable fonts in their stylesheets which will reside in the browser’s cache. This opens many possibilities!
Unfortunately, I’m concerned that it may be abused. How do you prevent someone from choosing an awful, illegible font on their web page? Interestingly enough, other concerns include the distribution of fonts under their many licences and support from other browsers.
Clagnut’s blog has more information on the upcoming web fonts.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Ah, I could swear Internet Explorer used to do something like that. That said, I think it’s a pretty good idea in conjunction with CSS. Let’s hope it’s easy to use.
Of course, the illegible font scenario is fine because there’s not that many truly god-awful fonts out there. I’m sure the browser vendors would include a simple way to blacklist fonts too.
That doesn’t really solve the problem of horrible and varied font rendering though. IE, Konqueror, and Safari will all have vastly different interpretations as to how the damn thins should look. I suppose that’s a good thing in some ways.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Yeah, I’ve noticed that after using this Mac extensively, the way OS X renders fonts is vastly different to freetype (Linux) and Windows. They look like they’re completely blurred. Admittedly, I haven’t played with them too much… but they’re starting to grow on me.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
That’s just natural. It’s the same way we can look at Microsoft Cleartype fonts and say “that’s an atrocious vomit of blurry rainbow colours” and yet others won’t use anything else.
I just hinting. If my “I” or “L” is more than a pixel wide, I go nuts.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
*Love hinting
June 29th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Yeah, I really came to appreciate how freetype renders in Linux. You’d totally hate OS X fonts.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Ugh, and I’m having problems with this text, it’s as though it’s not refreshing? Bug?
July 4th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
….And potential security problems.
July 5th, 2007 at 4:49 am
In other news, Mosaic is apparently implementing support for “images” in an upcoming version of its browser. Designers and developers will be able to specify downloadable images in their document which will reside in the browser’s cache. This opens many possibilities, not to mention security problems!
July 5th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Yes, those infected JPEGS floating around…
You make me laugh, Ashley.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Tate and Ashley make me happy in pants.
July 16th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Time to add some awesome to this post.. ME
July 23rd, 2007 at 9:33 pm
LOL, please, I don’t want any fag in my blog.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Not even lil ol’ me?
July 25th, 2007 at 9:39 am
OH LOL! You’re allowed… I suppose.
July 26th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Nice, just nice.
August 13th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
NG. TAT SCKS KTHX. TT HX SLF DNT KNW YYYYYY.
Fucker. Ekka is awesome. Go get fucked.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Reading over this again (why, I don’t know): Verdana and Georgia really can do the job for most websites I’ve ever been tasked in designing and doing the typography for. I find setting the type well is harder and more rewarding visually than just selecting a “cool” font.
My 0.3 cents.