Rant V - IE7 11
Microsoft is finally going to get in gear. Chris Wilson, one of the developers of Internet Explorer 7, posted on the IE Blog that they will finally properly support CSS and PNG alpha channels.
My response: it’s about time. Mr. Wilson says they’re listening to web developers, but where was that a year ago? Two years? Three? Seven? The latest major release they had was Internet Explorer 5, with version 6 being a security and bug fix, if that. That’s seven years of having the number one browser in the market stagnant. Seven years of misery as Web Developers have to hack their own code just to get it to look right in Internet Explorer 5 and 6. Some may say better late than never, but that doesn’t hold true in this instance.
I say Long Live Firefox, Long Live Safari, and Long Live Opera.
Viva la Revolución!
Typography, Web Design, and sIFR 13
The Problem
Us web designers have a truly limited range of choice when it comes to what font we use on our sites. We have to take in consideration that some fonts aren’t cross-platform. We have to take in consideration that some fonts that are cross-platform show up radically differently in different platforms (eg.: Georgia). So what it boils down to in terms of what web designers can actually use is Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Times New Roman, and a few others. That’s not much choice, especially when fonts can make all the difference in the appearance of the site.
I can hear you saying, “So? Deal with it,” in the background. When designing my site, and I start looking at what fonts I want to use, and I see Font-X looks twenty times better as header type than Font-Y does, but I’m forced to use Font-Y because Font-X is Mac specific, I get a bit mad. I don’t want to just “deal with it” anymore. It’s annoying. So, like many, I turn and see a solution: sIFR.
sIFR
So I’ve done my research– like a good boy– and the only solution that I think is worth noting is scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), currently maintained by Mike Davidson and based on the original IFR from Shaun Inman. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement uses Flash and Javascript to change normal text to any font the designer wants. This is, seemingly, and on paper, the perfect solution. However, I wouldn’t be writing this if sIFR was the perfect solution. It’s a solution, but not the solution. It has its problems.
Let’s start out with Javascript and Flash, the foundation of sIFR. Flash is extremely popular, and only some odd percentage of people (something around 3%) don’t have it. Javascript has been around for ages and is still a key scripting language in the industry. However, those 3% of people who don’t have Flash, and those odd number of people who turn off Javascript support in their browsers, well, they don’t see the effects of sIFR. Instead, they’ll see the font that the designer specifies for when sIFR fails, which will ultimately be one of select few fonts that the designer would have used anyways, defeating the point of sIFR.
The next problem is a biggie: loading speed. Half the world is still on dialup, and load speeds when rendering sIFR are slow, for the lack of a better word. I’ve personally seen sIFR take up to a minute to load on a 56k. That’s horribly slow just to see the title of a blog post.
The last problem I’ll mention is that sIFR is mainly for use on headers. It still doesn’t solve the problem of use for body text. For some, it’s not only about the headers, but also the main text. What’s the point in having nice looking headers when the text underneath still looks horrible?
sIFR is a good solution, but it’s not the solution, and we need the solution. I’ve heard tell that CSS3 will support typography in the way sIFR does, but CSS3 is a long way off. I hope, in the future, I won’t have to see sites default to Times New Roman because an aspiring designer that doesn’t know about typography issues, or just doesn’t think about it, uses a font that’s not on my system. I hope that solution comes along soon, for the sake of myself and the web design industry as a whole.
The Artist Formerly Known as The Multiple Backgrounds Article 4
[insert Greek-like symbol here]
What used to be here was an article on multiple backgrounds, however, being the dolt I am, I didn’t research before I posted, and the topic I was trying to push to get implemented with what little influence I have, was already thought of and implemented. So. Expect, at some point, a revised article and what can be done with Multiple Backgrounds in CSS3, but until then… Well… You just get to wait until then :P .
