An Island No More

November 28, 2009

Grabba Da Hut

ARUBA, N.A. – Aruba is a small desert island about twenty miles off the coast of Venezuela. It’s warm and sunny, yet dry. The trade winds send a gentle breeze across the landscape 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – an ever-pleasant kind of outdoor air conditioning. The water [...]

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Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition

November 16, 2009

Required Reading
As used by Jeffrey Zeldman and co-author Ethan Marcotte, the term “web standards” is a catchphrase that refers to writing web pages using, as a basis, a group of free and open technical specifications. The core specs being HTML, CSS, and Java­Script. Think of them as the three legs of a tripod upon which [...]

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An Open Letter To Retail Font Vendors

November 2, 2009

Call me Webmail.
I make web pages. And now that the latest browsers are supporting @font-face, I’ve been taking to the sites where fonts are sold.
I’ve never needed to go shopping for fonts before. And I’m distressed by what I see. And I’m distressed by what I don’t see.
First, let me tell you what I want: [...]

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Three Advances In Screen Typography

October 27, 2009

This, just in from Readable Web’s Department of Keeping Track:
New Font Control Features For Designers
The typography Wizards of Moz, Firefox devs Jonathan Kew and John Daggett have been cooking up some ways for web designers to take advantage of the advanced features of OpenType. If you want a peek at what web typography might be [...]

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Mozilla Formally Announces Support For WOFF (Web Open Font Format)

October 20, 2009

WOFF! WOFF! WOFF! WOFF! Mozilla has now made a formal statement regarding support for the Web Open Font Format. Plus a nice writeup on the whys and wherefores of WOFF by Firefox font honcho John Daggett.
Kudos to all who helped make this happen.
Apple? Google? Time to come out of the shadows. Where do you stand [...]

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Mozilla Announces Support For Web Open Font Format (WOFF) In Firefox 3.6

October 7, 2009

Mozilla has announced that support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) will be a part of Firefox upgrade 3.6.
Conceived by Mozilla’s own Jonathan Kew and font-designer/programmers Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming, WOFF addresses the concerns about unlicensed distribution expressed by many font-designers and, at the same time, holds the promise of a web-friendly, [...]

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Opera Admits @Font-Face Bugs In Opera 10

September 30, 2009

For sheer balls, you have to admire Opera’s CTO Håkon Wium Lie. Over the past couple of years he has: 1) filed an antitrust complaint with the EU against Microsoft for it’s failure to support “fundamental and open web standards” in Internet Explorer 2) addressed a group of professional font designers and advised them to, [...]

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On The Death Of The Great William Safire

September 28, 2009

One of Readable Web’s heroes, language maven William Safire, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79.

Safire was best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for the New York Times. But his deepest passion, and an endless source of delight to both Safire and his readers, was the English language. His weekly [...]

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Mo’ Bulletproofer @Font-Face CSS Syntax

September 15, 2009

Now that web fonts are supported in Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera 10, and *Chrome, web authors face new questions: How do these implementations differ? What CSS techniques will accommodate all?
Firefox developer John Daggett recently posted a little roundup about these issues and the workarounds that are being explored. In response to that post, [...]

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Web Fonts Panorama – September, 2009

September 8, 2009

Now that Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10+, Safari, and every existing version of Internet Explorer all support font-linking in one form or another, if you take the time, you can get a real feel for the future of typography on the web in a way you couldn’t do as little as 30 days ago.
I’ve spent a [...]

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