Been a while, eh? How you all doing? What a crazy couple weeks it’s been, but, since I find myself oddly wide-awake at 4am, I figured why not catch up on my RSS reading and blog writing, right? So here goes…
I have had the following three articles in my Google Reader for some time. Because they are all font-related, I have really wanted to read them and address them; this morning I finally made the time…
- First up is a CSS.info article about WOFF. Now, the first question I had was WTF is WOFF? So I went to the WOFF website and found that, as near as I can tell, it is a standardized font compression, so we can deliver compressed font files to browsers, hopefully without having to resort to multi-line
@font-facedeclarations. While my initial thought is “that’s great, compression is always good,” my next is “but wait, does that mean I’ll have to add yet another line to my@font-facedeclaration?” In the short-term, I think it would mean just that. So, is this another long-term-good-but-short-term-bad thing? - Next up is a cool new tool called the Font Dragr (at the time of this writing, the actual tool’s webpage is down, but at least you can read about it, and it IS cool, trust me!). In the CSS Ninja’s own words, Font Dragr let’s you “drag an drop a font file (otf, ttf, svg, woff) from your desktop into the browser and have text rendered on the fly using any available valid font.” So, am I right? Pretty cool, yes? Well, it is, when it’s working… This means you can try out fonts and see how they look without having to create the actual
@font-facedeclarations! Me like. - The last of the three articles is the mind-melting http://nickcowie.com/eotw/… I want to make sure everyone realizes that this page contains no images, it is all CSS, baby… View it in Safari 4 for the most impressive experience, but FF3.5 is no slouch either… Then, just for fun, check it out in IE6… :-)
Moving on…
At first I was SOOOOOO excited to read about Google’s release of their own JavaScript library, Closure! I thought, man, if I could use Google’s library, could my sites start performing like Gmail? (Yes, yes, when the server is running, ha ha… :-) But then I read that not everyone is impressed with Closure… What is a poor developer to do?
I guess I’ll simply keep listening to the official jQuery podcasts…
The idea behind Lunascape 6 is awesome, sort of a limited version of BrowserShots.org right on your desktop, but could it ever be as solid as simply having the different browsers? And what about versioning? What if my browser matrix says I need IE6+, FF2+, and Safari3+? Great idea, but not quite there, I’m afraid…
LOVE: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee
And in Microsoft News…
- I wasn’t aware that installing PHP on a Windows PC was that difficult, but apparently it is now easier?
- Windows 7 XP Mode alone will make me buy a copy of Win7… Which will be my first purchased version of Windows since… ever?
- A fairly-nice-sized light at the end of the IE tunnel for developers…
Briefly back to the world of fonts…
- Jason Santa Maria writes a nice, if lengthy, article about typography, including what I think will be the next challenge of design-challenged developers: how to choose the right fonts for your page, and make sure they go well together… the next
marqueeof the web… - And for a little more help in that general direction, a SitePoint article about the “definitive” font stacks.
- Perhaps Web Font Specimen could be a nice alternative to the above-mentioned Font Dragr?
From the annals of Dan “the Man” Mendelsohn, comes the Scroll Clock. I love this idea, but as I said to Dan, “this could be made better only by adding this little line to the CSS: body{background:#000;}“…
In preparation for today’s Standards.Next, the HTML5 Glossary! Start reading, everyone, there will be a quiz…
And this one’s just for you, Alla…
Okay, it’s now 6am, Marianne just got up, so it’s time for bagels and coffee! What a way to start a day! :-)
Happy reading, all,
Atg