Category: Web Standards

Categories
Browsers bugs Design firefox Mozilla Web Design Web Standards work zeldman.com

Firefox forces orange background flash

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 for Windows no longer cut long pages of this site in half, hiding 50% or more of the pages’ content, including the footer, because of a newly discovered bug in Firefox (discovered by this site’s layout).

The bad news is that the price of the “fix” is an annoying flash of reddish-orange background. When you first load a page in any browser, rather than the main content’s off-white background area, you instead see the text against a reddish-orange background, obscuring words (including the drop cap), disrupting user experience, and raising doubts about the professionalism of the site and thus of the opinions it expresses.

With the annoying flash of colored background, everyone who reads this site suffers. But without it, Firefox 3/3.5 cuts long pages in half. Until Firefox fixes the bug, all readers of this site will experience what I’ll label “the Flash of wrongly styled background color.” (Note: although the browser is still broken, the color flash has since been “fixed.” Impatient ones, skip ahead to the 9 July update. Narrative fans, keep reading.)

Here’s the story.

Validators were no help

My 2 July post, XHTML DOA WTF, has thus far received 194 comments. Firefox users told me the thread “died” after comment #44049 in Firefox 3 and 3.5 for Windows. The problem also later surfaced on In Defense of Web Developers, written yesterday morning just prior to my surgery. Let’s stick with the 2 July post, though, which is where we did our Q&A.

W3C and WDG validation services both indicated that there was an error on the page, but neither validator could explain it.

  • The W3C showed a long list of unclosed elements (which in fact were closed), a typical W3C validation error when that validator misidentifies the actual problem. The W3C validator has made this mistake since at least 2001. Whenever I complain to the W3C, I’m told they need volunteers to help them fix the validator. So I more often rely on the WDG validation service.
  • The WDG validator (usefully and apparently correctly) indicated that a single illegal UTF character in a comment it could not show me was causing the dilemma. This validator gave me a line number, but no code output—making the line number useless, and forcing me to go into my database and examine each of 194 comments visually for unsupported character problems.

In search of a single UTF-16 character

I next spent two hours of an insanely busy pre-surgery day unsuccessfully attempting to manually track down UTF errors in comments that no validation service was able to pointpoint. I had to apologize to colleagues and clients to whom I owed work, since the quest to make my personal site legible and usable to Firefox users took precedence over paying work in my sad little mind. (Call it a mark of the high esteem in which I hold Firefox; also call it a concern for readers.)

Automattic’s designer/developer (and my friend) Noel Jackson then took over for me and was eventually able to locate a single UTF error in a Japanese pingback. Or so it seemed.

WordPress, the power behind this site, is supposed to convert illegal UTF-16 to legal UTF-8, and we thought it had done so. Nevertheless, the only validation service to have claimed anything semi-coherent said otherwise. To solve the problem required brute force: we deleted the entire Japanese comment. To the clients and colleagues to whom I owed work I was unable to finish while tracking down a Firefox bug, I now also owed an apology to a Japanese blogger. Personally, I blamed Firefox for ludicrously Draconian error handling, but at least I thought we had “solved” the needless problem raised by such behavior.

Drudge work for nothing

I owe Firefox an apology. Draconian error handling of impossible-to-trace possible UTF errors was not the cause of its failure to display pages correctly. Inability to parse valid CSS on long pages was the actual cause.

Although my page now validated, Firefox still cut it off at the waist. Thanks to this bug, users of Firefox—many of whom care greatly about web standards (it’s one reason so many developers choose Firefox)—were unable to read more than half the comments about XHTML 2 and HTML 5 from their fellow standardistas. They were also unable to post comments or view the footer (thus making them unable to view other content on this site, as well as third-party site highlighted in the footer). This was a win for nobody, except maybe Microsoft, Opera, and Safari. And, like I said, we like Firefox and people who use it. Back to the drawing board.

Seek and ye shall not find

Nikolay Bachiyski, a lead developer at Automattic, then conducted a series of tests:

  1. He established that only Firefox 3.0/3.5 (and only in Windows) cut the valid web page’s content in half.
  2. He verified that the page’s content was valid (UTF-8) as was its markup.
  3. The DOM loaded properly.
  4. There wasn’t an (X)HTML parsing problem.
  5. Disabling JavaScript made no difference.
  6. Disabling CSS enabled all the page’s content to display in Firefox; turning CSS back on cut the page in half again. Clearly, the issue was with CSS.
  7. Nikolay then disabled the lines of Mozilla- and Webkit- oriented CSS3 that generate “warnings” or “errors” in the W3C validation service. But even with those lines disabled and the CSS completely valid, the page’s content failed to display completely in Firefox. The bottom of the page was still cut off.

A CSS “fix” with a drawback

Valid CSS was somehow to “blame” for Firefox’s inability to show a long page without hiding half the content.

You may ask why I didn’t discover this problem during the building and testing of my site’s redesign. You might even ask why my readers didn’t discover it (since I beta tested the redesign at several stages). The answer is simple. I never tested a dummy blog post with nearly 200 comments. It didn’t occur to me that more than 40 comments would be necessary to test whether valid CSS and XHTML would work in good modern browsers, let alone in one as excellent as Firefox.

Michel Bozgounov and Kyle Weems then proposed a simple CSS fix:

div#wrapper {overflow: visible;}

My friend Noel implemented the CSS fix while I was unconscious and having stuff cut out of me.

It works, and I thank all these gentlemen. But it has the unfortunately side-effect of inflicting a flash of reddish-orange background on the page until most or all content has loaded. (I had previously spent over two weeks eliminating that flash of background.) And it does this in all browsers (or nearly all), not just Firefox. To force Firefox to display all content on a page, I have to force every other browser to flash red before it shows content.

Obviously, it’s vital that Firefox users be enabled to read and comment on long or popular posts. But there must be a better way than deforming the CSS. And there is a better way: namely, a Firefox bug fix.

Our friends at WordPress have contacted our friends at Mozilla, so we are hopeful that this will be fast-tracked. Mozilla friends, call on me to help at any time.

9 July Update: 99% solution

With the addition of 1000px of min-height to #wrapper, the reddish-orange flash has been eliminated, at least in pages that load quickly. (On long pages, or with slow connections, the reddish-orange background remains painfully visible until the page finishes loading.) Read more about this CSS adjustment. Note that adding CSS workarounds is not the same thing as fixing browser bugs. (Indeed, CSS workarounds may retard browser development by removing the problem so it never gets fixed.)

A Firefox Test Page

As I am not entirely satisfied with this CSS workaround (despite my gratitude to its authors) and as I do not want Mozilla’s engineering wizards to be unable to fix Firefox because of changes to my CSS, I have posted a Firefox test page using the site’s original (perfectly fine, background-flash-less) CSS, and a page explaining the Firefox test page.—JZ

Read more

  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]browser, bugs, Firefox3, Firefox3.5, Firefox/Windows, browsers, firefoxbugs[/tags]

Categories
Community HTML spec Standards The Essentials Web Design Web Design History Web Standards XHTML

In defense of web developers

It has only been a few days but I am already sick of the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely.

A coterie of well-informed codemeisters, from ppk to Ian Hickson, has always had legit beefs with XHTML, the most persuasive of which was Hickson’s:

It is suggested that HTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01, and authors who wish to use XHTML should deliver their markup as application/xhtml+xml.

This problem always struck me as more theoretical than real, but I pointed it out in every edition of Designing With Web Standards and left it to the reader to decide. When I wrote the first edition of the book, some versions of Mozilla and IE would go into Quirksmode in the presence of HTML 4, breaking CSS layouts. To me, that was a worse problem than whatever was supposed to be scary or bad about using well-formed XHTML syntax while delivering it as HTML all browsers could support.

The opportunity to rethink markup

The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day. The web is better for this and always will be, and there is much still to do, as many people who create websites still have not heard the call.

A few who became disenchanted with XHTML early retreated to HTML 4, and as browsers stopped going into Quirksmode in its presence, valid, structural HTML 4 became a reasonable option again. But both HTML 4 and XHTML 1 were document languages, not transactional languages. They were all noun, and almost no verb. So Ian Hickson, XHTML’s biggest critic, fathered HTML 5, an action-oriented toddler specification that won’t reach adulthood until 2022, although some of it can be used today.

And guess what? HTML 5 is as controversial today as XHTML was in 2000, and there are just as many people who worry that a specification of which they don’t entirely approve is being shoved down their throats by an “uncaring elite.” Only this time, instead of the W3C, the “uncaring elite” is Mr Hickson, with W3C rubber stamp, and input from browser makers, including his employer.

XHTML not dead

All of this is to say that XHTML is not dead (XHTML 2 is dead, thank goodness), and HTML 5 is not here yet. Between now and 2022, we have plenty of time to learn about HTML 5 and contribute to the discussion—and browser makers have 13 years to get it right. Which is also to say all of us—not just those who long ago retreated to HTML 4, or who became fans of HTML 5 before it could even say “Mama”—are entitled to be pleased that standard markup activity will now have a single focus, rather than a dual one (with XHTML 2 the dog spec that no one was willing to mercy-kill until now).

Entitled to be pleased is not the same as entitled to gloat and name call. As DN put it in comment-44126:

What is really rather aggravating is how many people are using this news as a stick with which to beat any developer or freelancer who’s had the audacity to study up on and use XHTML in good faith–or even, much to the horror of the Smug Knowbetters, admire XHTML’s intelligible markup structure–for the brand-new-minted sin of doing the most with XHTML that’s possible. The ‘unofficial Q&A’ is ripe with that kind of condescension. …[D]on’t pin users (front-end developers are merely users of specifications) with Microsoft’s failure to support the correct MIME type.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]HTML, HTML5, W3C, WTF, XHTML, XML[/tags]

Categories
HTML HTML5 Markup Web Design History Web Standards XHTML

XHTML DOA WTF

Firefox developers who were initially alerted to a problem on this page, please view the Firefox test page and the page that explains its use. — JZ

The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. 1999: XML is the light and XHTML is the way. 2009: XHTML is dead—kind of.

From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009:

XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5

2009-07-02: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML. A FAQ answers questions about the future of deliverables of the XHTML 2 Working Group, and the status of various discussions related to HTML. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)

Please note that this thread has been updated with useful comments and links that help make sense of the emergence of HTML 5, the death of XHTML 2.0, and what designers and developers need to know about the present and future of web markup.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009

[tags]W3C, XML, XHTML, HTML, HTML5, WTF[/tags]

Categories
Browsers Compatibility CSS Design Marketing Markup Microsoft software spec Standards State of the Web style The Profession Tools W3C Web Standards Working XHTML

Sour Outlook

It’s outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let’s do something about it.

Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that in IE8, Microsoft has released a browser that supports web standards at a high level. The shockingly bad news is that Microsoft is still using the Word rendering engine to display HTML email in Outlook 2010.

What does this mean for web designers, developers, and users? In the words of the “Let’s Fix It” project created by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor, and Newism, it means exactly this:

[F]or the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

It’s difficult to believe that in 2009, after diligently improving standards support in IE7 and now IE8, Microsoft would force email designers to use nonsemantic table layout techniques that fractured the web, squandered bandwidth, and made a joke of accessibility back in the 1990s.

Accounting for stupidity

For a company that claims to believe in innovation and standards, and has spent five years redeeming itself in the web standards community, the decision to use the non-standards-compliant, decades-old Word rendering engine in the mail program that accompanies its shiny standards-compliant browser makes no sense from any angle. It’s not good for users, not good for business, not good for designers. It’s not logical, not on-brand, and the very opposite of a PR win.

Rumor has it that Microsoft chose the Word rendering engine because its Outlook division “couldn’t afford” to pay its browser division for IE8. And by “couldn’t afford” I don’t mean Microsoft has no money; I mean someone at this fabulously wealthy corporation must have neglected to budget for an internal cost. Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

But if the rumor’s right, and if the Outlook division couldn’t afford to license the IE8 rendering engine, there are two very simple solutions: use Webkit or Gecko. They’re both free, and they both kick ass.

Why it matters

You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform.

Likewise, most web designers, whether in-house, agency, or freelance, are perpetually called upon to create HTML emails for opt-in customers. As Outlook’s Word rendering engine doesn’t support the most basic CSS layout tools such as float, designers cannot use our hard-won standards-based layout tools in the creation of these mails—unless they and their employers are willing to send broken messages to tens millions of Outlook users. No employer, of course, would sanction such a strategy. And this is precisely how self-serving decisions by Microsoft profoundly retard the adoption of standards on the web. Even when one Microsoft division has embraced standards, actions by another division ensure that millions of customers will have substandard experiences and hundreds of thousands of developers still won’t get the message that our medium has standards which can be used today.

So it’s up to us, the community, to let Microsoft know how we feel.

Participate in the Outlook’s Broken project. All it takes is a tweet.

[tags]browsers, bugs, IE8, outlook, microsoft, iranelection[/tags]

Categories
Design Web Design Web Standards Working

Web standards curriculum

WaSP InterAct is a “living, open web standards curriculum.” Put together by an amazing group of dedicated educators and industry experts, the curriculum is designed to teach students the skills of the web professional—and ease the burden of colleges and universities, struggling to develop timely and appropriate curricula for our fast-moving profession.

Schools that teach web design struggle to keep pace with our industry, and those just starting their curricula often set off in the wrong direction because the breadth and depth of our medium can be daunting. The WaSP InterAct curriculum project seeks to ease the challenges schools around the world face as they prepare their students for careers on the Web. … Its courses are divided into six learning tracks that provide students with a well rounded foundation in the many facets of the web design craft.

The group offers its resources to all who need them (to reuse adapt), and it seeks your content and ideas.

[tags]design, data, webdesign, webstandards, education, curriculum, WaSP, webstandards.org[/tags]

Categories
CSS Design development DWWS Education Publications Publishing Respect Web Design Web Standards Zeldman

Beep

For the third edition of Designing With Web Standards, I’ve brought in a co-author: the brilliant and talented Mr Ethan Marcotte.

Mr Ethan Marcotte

Mr Marcotte is a web designer/developer who “works for Airbag Industries as a Senior Designer, swears profusely on Twitter, and is getting married to an incredible lady.” He is also a technical editor and contributing author to A List Apart, and the co-author of several fine books about the intersection between great code and fine design. Then there’s the fact that I dig him. I dig the hell out of him. I love him like a younger, sweeter, funnier brother.

That’s important because I don’t add a co-author to any book, let alone this book, lightly. In asking Ethan to help me bring the awesome to this substantially revised and rewritten edition, I chose not only on the basis of expertise and writing ability, but also on sheer karma.

In his new role, Ethan joins a SuperFriends™ line-up including technical editor Aaron Gustafson (Twitter), another honey of a guy, and truly one of the smartest, most innovative, and most knowledgeable voices in web standards, and editor Erin Kissane (Twitter), whose mastery of the subtlest details of voice consistency alone makes her the finest editor I have ever been blessed to work with. Behind it all, there’s Michael Nolan (Twitter), New Riders’ sagely seasoned acquisitions editor and a designer and author himself, who first took a chance on me as an author back in nineteen ninety humph.

Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition is coming this year to a bookstore near you. I thank my brilliant crew for making it possible. Onward!

[tags]EthanMarcotte, beep, unstoppablerobotninja, airbag, alistapart, CSS, design, webstandards, webdesign, designingwithwebstandards, DWWS, 3rdedition, DWWS3e, writer, writers, authors[/tags]

Categories
Web Design Web Standards wordpress work Zeldman zeldman.com

Redesigned

The zeldman.com redesign is up. You’re soaking in it. It’s old school. It’s brand heritage, baby. It’s retro 90s web. It’s so retro it’s nowtro. Because old is the new new.

Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many influential projects, I naturally considered doing a wide, three-column, ultra-modern design—something cool, detached, polished, and glowing with rich media and fancy-pants sliding-drawer JavaScript effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. In the right circumstances, those things can rock hard. But this site is mainly about my writing. So I crafted a simple look that encourages reading and hearkens back to this site’s early years.

Read more about it here, here, there, and elsewhere. (Don’t freak out; these old posts are now in the new layout, adding a layer of surrealism to the experience, since you’re looking at a blog post in the finished new look that links to and talks about cruddy early versions of that same look.)

If orange hurts you, there’s a style switcher in the footer that will remember your preference for an off-white background. You’re welcome.

WordPress implementation by Noel Jackson.

Rotation script by Mark Huot.

Thanks, fellas! And thanks to all readers who critiqued the public beta.

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, redesigns, webdesign, design[/tags]

Categories
Design HTML HTML5 Standards State of the Web W3C Web Design Web Standards

NSFW tag in HTML 5

A “Not Safe for Work” Tag has been proposed for HTML 5:

One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, this could be made much simpler and standardized. Browsers could then have an option to automatically hide all <NSFW> content. A tag is preferred to an attribute since it could then also be used around content and not just links.

Examples:
<nsfw><a href=”http://www.example.com”>Pics here!</a></nsfw>
<nsfw><img src=”badkitten.jpg”></nsfw>

(Via Bruce Lawson)

Drew McLellan of The Web Standards Project thinks it’s a nice idea that won’t work:

@brucel we looked into #nsfw in microformats. It’s an unworkable minefield. #

it’s used when linking to something that you might want to save until you get home. e.g. http://ampleboobies.info (NSFW) #

So a browser could conceivably be configured not to follow links or display content tagged nsfw. Sounds a good idea, but unworkable. #

The use of tags (rather than CSS and JavaScript) to hide or show content is an intriguing and controversial aspect of HTML 5. It’s intriguing because using a standard tag—instead of writing custom CSS and JavaScript that someone else may someday have to maintain—potentially simplifies web development and maintenance, bringing advanced techniques of content presentation to more sites for less money. It’s controversial because it sticks presentation and behavior back in markup, after we all just spent a decade separating site structure and semantics from behavior and presentation.

We’re going to be following these developments and trying to make buzzword-free sense of them for you.

[tags]standards, webstandards, HTML, HTML5, tags, NSFW, W3C[/tags]

Categories
Design Fonts Ideas industry Typography Web Design Web Standards

Real fonts on the web, part 2

Introducing Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

See also: “Web Fonts Now: How We’re Doing With That” (23 May 2009) right here at zeldman.com.

[tags]webdesign, webstandards, @font-face, typekit, realfonts[/tags]

Categories
Advocacy Code Design development HTML HTML5 Web Design Web Standards XHTML

“Google Bets Big on HTML 5”

While the entire HTML 5 standard is years or more from adoption, there are many powerful features available in browsers today. In fact, five key next-generation features are already available in the latest (sometimes experimental) browser builds from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome.

Tim O’Reilly: Google Bets Big on HTML 5

Striving to avoid the mistake Microsoft made when it bet on binary applications over the web, Google is counting on HTML 5 adoption to expand the capability of web applications. Tim O’Reilly describes Google’s strategy and lists five key HTML 5 features that are already supported in Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

[tags]HTML5, Google, O’Reilly, TimO’Reilly, canvas, browsers, webapps, web applications, webstandards[/tags]

Categories
Interviews Press Publications Publishing reportage reprints Standards Typography Usability User Experience UX Web Design Web Standards wisdom Zeldman zeldman.com

.net interview

There was a point in the 90s when I felt like a sucker for doing HTML and CSS.”

The .net Zeldman interview is available for your downloading pleasure (4.2 MB PDF). For more of the best in web design and development, visit netmag.co.uk.

Update, 27 May 2009

An HTML version of the interview has now been posted on .net’s website.

[tags]webdesign, webdevelopment, magazine, interview, .net, netmag, interview, interviews, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Advocacy content copyright creativity CSS Design development DWWS Fonts Ideas industry links Real type on the web Standards State of the Web Tools Web Design Web Standards webfonts webtype

Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)

THE WEB Fonts Wiki has a page listing fonts you can legally embed in your site designs using the CSS standard @font-face method. Just as importantly, the wiki maintains a page showing commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding. Between these two wiki pages, you may find just the font you need for your next design (even if you can’t currently license classics like Adobe Garamond or ITC Franklin and Clarendon).

The advantages of using fonts other than Times, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana have long been obvious to designers; it’s why web design in the 1990s was divided between pages done in Flash, and HTML pages containing pictures of fonts—a practice that still, bizarrely, continues even in occasionally otherwise advanced recent sites.

Using real fonts instead of pictures of fonts or outlines of fonts provides speed and accessibility advantages.

Currently the Webkit-based Apple Safari browser supports @font-face. The soon-to-be-released next versions of Opera Software’s Opera browser, Google’s Webkit-based Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox will do likewise. When I say “soon-to-be-released,” I mean any day now. When this occurs, all browsers except IE will support @font-face.

IE has, however, offered font embedding since IE4 via Embedded OpenType (.EOT), a font format that enables real fonts to be temporarily embedded in web pages. That is, the reader sees the font while reading the page, but cannot download (“steal”) the font afterwards. Microsoft has “grant[ed] to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any Microsoft copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses,” in hopes that EOT would thereby become a standard. But so far, only Microsoft’s own browsers support EOT.

Thus, as we consider integrating real fonts into our designs, we must navigate between browsers that support @font-face now (Safari), those that will do so soon (Opera, Chrome, Firefox), and the one that possibly never will (IE, with a dwindling but still overwhelming market share).

The person who figures out a designer-friendly solution to all this will either be hailed as a hero/heroine or get rich. Meanwhile, near-complete solutions of varying implementation difficulty exist. Read on:

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

“Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.” An introduction to @font-face by Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS.

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow

Is there life after Georgia? To understand issues surrounding web fonts from the type designer’s perspective, I interview David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the ?rst TrueType type designer.

The W3C: @font-face vs. EOT

A discussion that shows why the W3C may not be able to resolve this conflict. (It’s kind of like asking the Montagues and Capulets to decide whether the Montagues or the Capulets should rule Verona.)

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Mike Davidson’s scalable and accessible remix of Shaun Inman’s pioneering use of Flash and JavaScript to replace short passages of HTML text with Flash movies of the same text set in a real font. The Flash movies are created on the fly. If JavaScript or images are turned off, the user “sees” the HTML text; text set in sIFR can also be copied and pasted. sIFR was a great initial solution to the problem of real fonts on the web, but it’s only for short passages (which means the rest of the page must still be set in Georgia or Verdana), and it fails if the user has a Flash block plug-in installed, as half of Firefox users seem to. It’s also always a pain to implement. I don’t know any designer or developer who has an easy time setting up sIFR. In short, while sIFR is an awesome stop-gap, real fonts on the web are still what’s needed. Which also leads us to…

Cufón – Fonts for the People

Simo Kinnunen’s method of embedding fonts, regardless of whether or not a browser supports @font-face.

Combining Cufón And @Font-Face

Kilian Valkhof: “Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.”

Adobe, Web Fonts, and EOT

Why Adobe supports Microsoft’s EOT instead of @font-face.

Introducing Typekit

Update May 28, 2009: Working with Jason Santa Maria, Jeff Veen’s company Small Batch Inc. introduces Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

Read more

  • Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
  • Web Fonts Now, for real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard. — 16 July 2009

[tags]fonts, webfonts, webdesign, embed, @font-face, EOT, wiki, css, layout, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, browsers[/tags]

Categories
CSS Design development Happy Cog™ HTML Web Design Web Standards wordpress work Working XHTML Zeldman zeldman.com

Orange you glad

Working on the footer of zeldman.com redesign. Once footer is done, going to adjust header and Twitter sidebar blip.

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, css[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart Appearances better-know-a-speaker cities Code Community conferences content creativity CSS Design development Education eric meyer events HTML industry Information architecture Seattle Web Design Web Standards

Seattle-bound

City of Puget Sound, Jimi Hendrix, and the space needle, here I come for An Event Apart Seattle 2009—two days of peace, love, design, code, and content.

[tags]seattle, aneventapart, webdesign, webstandards, design, conference, conferences, webdesign conference, webdesign conferences, standards, IA, UX, ericmeyer, jeffreyzeldman, zeldman, meyerweb[/tags]

Categories
CSS Design Web Design Web Standards Zeldman zeldman.com

Alternate color scheme

Thanks for the great feedback, folks. For those who find the orange background objectionable, I’ll offer a user-selectable alternate color scheme, like this one (quick sketch, ignore the color of the printer’s mark at the top, final colors may vary).

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, webdesign, css, code[/tags]

%d bloggers like this: