Web Fontography Fun

With the rise of @font-face font linking in the all of the “big five” desktop browsers—Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome—true web-specific typography is beginning to take shape.

In an excellent blog post from "A List Apart," Richard Fink looks at several events that have brought web typography to the forefront and addresses some of the issues it still faces. He covers the following in depth:

1. A Web Fonts Working Group was chartered at the W3C on March 18, 2010. Its first order of business was to establish the WOFF specification as the standard compressed “wrapper” format for delivering sfnt (OTF and TTF) fonts on the web.
2. Font rendering in IE9 using Windows’s DirectWrite has been unveiled via the see-for-yourself IE9 Platform Preview.
3. The first round of web font preparation tools like Font Squirrel’s @Font-FaceGenerator and EOTFAST have appeared.
4. A new wave of “font hosting and obfuscation” services (FHOS) have appeared alongside Typekit, Typotheque, and the free and open source Kernest.
5. The first “trusting” web font licenses from commercial font designers have appeared.
6. The CSS3 Fonts Module has evolved to include some of the advanced features of OpenType.
7. Adobe Flash, once a reliable cross-platform means of text replacement (sIFR), now appears permanently crippled.
8. Google has launched a free font-hosting service for a growing library of fonts. All of them available for self-hosting, too.

First of all, it's about time we found a way to use more fonts on the web. I'm really amazed it took this long!

Second, the new font formats for the web mentioned in the post including WOFF are a step in the right direction. WOFF is essentially a zipped font file that will soon be the standard “transport format” for fonts. It’s gaining support from Mozilla and Chrome right now and was sponsored by Microsoft and Opera in a submission to the W3C Fonts Working Group.

And finally (thankfully), Fink points out that he believes the Font Hosting And Obfuscation Services (FHOS) such as Typekit, Typotheque, Kernest and others are just a passing phase on the way to much better supported web typography solutions. We’re still in the growing pains of this new technology.

"You can view FHOS as a phase. Services are innovating. For example, the WebINK service from Extensis features a free installable “preview wizard” of sorts called Type Drawer that enables you, among other things, to instantly swap selected fonts on your page with drag and drop simplicity. This can be a huge time saver and it is certainly the kind of authoring tool designers need. Right now it’s proprietary to the WebINK service, but still it helps in shaping things to come."

Blindfolded Design 2.0 Peeking at CSS

I can't get away from the idea that coding CSS is a guessing game for beginners.
My process lately has digressed into:
1. Guess the best measures for different margins and colors.
2. Save the document.
3. Cross fingers.
4. Close one eye (somehow disappointment is better through one eye at a time).
5. Refresh browser or preview screen.
6. Sigh.
7. Guess again.

I am very thankful for layout generators, but that only gets you so far.

After our last project site, a site comprised of two to three pages, I've added one more criteria to my website design checklist: Check on another computer. I had checked the site in other browsers on my laptop, but it looked significantly different on my work computer. I think it had something to do with my  default browser font size because my text looked huge on the other computer.

Now, I'm not only guessing against what I can see in the five browsers I have on my computer, but also against what I can't see on other's screens. I'm having a hard time adjusting to that!

In other news, I'm excited about the added design properties available in CSS3 we've just started looking at in class. Hoorah for text-shadow!

I'm older than the World Wide Web

Above the abridged, international version of the history of the internet video we watched last week. I really enjoy the extra details about England and France because I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn't just us Americans who contributed to the internet's inception. The relative infancy of the internet and the it's more modern component the World Wide Web (WWW) surprised me.

I'm older than the web. If you were born before 1990, so are you. It's just mind-boggling to look back on how fast the technological changes happened once good old Tim Berners-Lee came up with HTML and coined the WWW we all use now. It's been only 20 years!

The number of sites has also grown exponentially.

According to a 2008 Google study, there are more than one trillion unique URLs on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the WWW. Back in January of 1996 there were 100,000 websites, and looking back even further to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…

Here's a graphic outlining the growth of websites from 1990 to 2008. I'm sure at this point the graph line is pointing straight up due to the massive growth in more recent years.

Wonder about that one, single website back in December of 1990? That was info.cern.ch, the first-ever website and web server, created by Berners-Lee.

Historical perspective achieved. I can't believe I'm older than the web! From here it's just a hop, skip and a jump away from a, "I remember when" comment I can deliver to the next generation. Boy I feel old.