Three tidbits from this week:
I published an article on W3C Web Fonts at Ars Technica the other day.
I did another Open Web Podcast this week, this time with Ryan Steward of Adobe.
On Thursday I gave a talk at the Web Experience Forum here in Boston talking about Performance Improvements that are coming in new browsers.
Rik (October 18, 2008 at 9:06 am)
There’s some mistakes about browser support. Here are the ones i’ve catch.
Safari 3.1 already ships with @font-face support and Selectors API. Opera is already supporting text-shadow (since 9.5) and you haven’t mentioned Safari and Firefox versions. Firefox 3.1 doesn’t have CSS Transition support (yet ?).
José Jeria (October 18, 2008 at 9:58 am)
John, the Ars Technica article says that web fonts are not supported in Safari until version 4. This seems to be wrong, since the page renders with the custom font on Mac using Safari 3.1.2
William J. Edney (October 21, 2008 at 12:14 pm)
John –
Slide 4 says ‘Spring 2009’ for FF 3.1. Is that really when you guys expect to release? I had thought Jan 2009 was closer.
Do I need to pay more attention to Mozilla schedules? ;-)
Cheers,
– Bill
sunnybear (October 22, 2008 at 4:07 pm)
The more complicated browsers are — the more differencies between them exist. Now it’s not enough just to support ‘standards complaince mode’. Browsers need fast JS engine, closures / leaks cleanp-up procedures / a lot of native functionaluty from JS libraries and CSS effects.
More prorabable future lies in JS frameworks that are light enough to be able to load fast and can supply almost all of the modern features before all (I mean at least IE — 70% of users) browsers will do this.
And of course almost all issues about performance must be resolved by these libraries. Who cares that Safari has the fastest JS engine? Millions of IE6 users who need a website working fast?
g_gus (October 30, 2008 at 6:33 am)
Hi, I found this image of a Halloween powered by jQuery.
http://www.anieto2k.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/2981496331_087fa810a4.jpg
:)
Nick Fletcher (October 30, 2008 at 8:52 pm)
Haha. That’s great, g_gus.
Richard Fink (October 31, 2008 at 10:03 am)
@john
Caught your article at Ars T.
I have a great deal of respect for your intellectual integrity and seemingly limitless enthusiasm.
However, I’ve been following the implementation of @font-face, as well as the IP debate about “direct” linking of TTF files very closely as both a web developer and independent journalist for some time now, and it is a much, much more complicated issue than it may seem at first glance.
Font files are simply not (as some suggest) the same as image files – not in actuality, and not legally, either – and since you are someone who I know is genuinely committed to building a better online world, I urge you to read up on it before “evangelizing” further.
(Pop me an email, I’ll send you more links on this topic than you can imagine!)
BTW, Opera’s implementation of @font-face can be experienced using their Wingogi or Lingogi build, available here:
Opera Labs
Without good font-sets, we’re all screwed and screwed big time. The big question is whether the current implementations of @font-face in Safari, FF3.1, and soon, other browsers, further that common interest or thwart it.
Just my two cents.
ciao
Richard Fink (October 31, 2008 at 10:06 am)
Oops, blew the link in my previous post:
Opera’s implementation of @font-face can be experienced using their Wingogi or Lingogi build, available here:
Opera Labs
http://labs.opera.com/downloads/
Ido (November 12, 2008 at 2:52 pm)
Thanks for the information. It will be interesting to see how IE8 will do things (at last!) more ‘normally’ and we’ll save us the headache of lots twikis that we needed to do spcially for IE6 etc’.