

@font-face makes the web pretty (or ugly). (Needs FF 3.5 or Safari) - yummyfajitas
http://craigmod.com/journal/font-face/

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jerf
Dear designers: COLUMNS DO NOT BELONG ON THE WEB.

If you want a thin column for design reasons, hey, go for it, but I hate
scrolling down, then up, then down, then up, then sideways (in my browser
there's a horizontal scroll on that page right now). ONE thin column. ONE. I
should be able to read your page with my hand on the space bar and nothing
else.

Think of this as the equivalent of the suggestion that no matter how awesome
your 10" x 15" design may be, when it needs to fit on a 8"x11.5" paper it
doesn't work. Jamming columns into this medium is simply bringing over old,
inapplicable biases to a new medium; work with the medium, not against it.

~~~
blasdel
You're right, tall vertical columns are total shit on a screen.

But fixed-height horizontally scrolling columns are _AMAZING_ :
<http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/> \-- they work so perfectly on a screen when done
well, better than anything else by far. The lines always stay in the same
vertical alignment, and the columns in the same horizontal alignment,
eliminating jitter -- the text changes without moving shit around.

~~~
jerf
Interesting. I'd like to see a video of that in action. I'm skeptical still,
but I'm also a person who has no problem with the current status quo. I was
reading books on my 160x160 Palm Pilot with little objection. This appears to
make me an outlier. (I think it may because I started on the Commodore 64 on a
regular television; against _that_ reading experience, a clean 160x160 is
still an improvement!)

Properly done that could work.

Do you use it? When you scroll over one or more columns, the system jumps
column-wise, right? Not like a scrollbar would on a normal web page, which
wouldn't jump to columns at all, and would have problems with half-displayed
columns (which are useless).

~~~
blasdel
I used to use Tofu incessantly when I used Macs at home + work, I've been
meaning to write a clone in some X toolkit or XUL for a while.

You have it exactly right, it jumps one column at a time XOR one screen's
worth at a time. When you first set it up you tweak not just the font +
colors, but the width + padding of the columns.

I used to use it on my 12" PowerBook all the time, set up with one of the
Vista fonts in light lavender on very-dark gray, with two columns fit onto the
1024x768 screen with the window maximized. I read millions of words that way,
it's easily the fastest and least-fatiguing reading method I've used, though
the ergonomics of the laptop ain't great.

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quoderat
I really don't look forward to giving everyone the ability to use whatever
crazy, hard-on-the-eyes font they want to use.

Hitler on fonts:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDiDATbIG-o>

(Not for the humor-challenged.)

~~~
thismat
Oh, I think this will be hilarious...Everyone loves to see Comic Sans in every
corporate email, because it's a "laid back" font. Now we get to have it
plastered all over the web too. Every blogspot blog will not be graced with
paragraphs of it.

~~~
callahad
I think it's great! Yet another tool for quickly answering that age old
question: "Is reading this worth my time?"

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rufo
I realize that on the whole, broadband connections are getting faster, but
3.3MB for the full font set seems like it might be a little much:
<http://imgur.com/Y3SHZ.png>

~~~
thismat
3.3mb for a font used for headers across the site, or getting that much or
more (as the site scales) from the images needed, or generated, or flash used
replacement, et cetera.

It seems like a lot, but if it caches, it would probably end up being less
overhead.

~~~
andreyf
I'm not sure if that matters too much - it takes over a second for those to
load on my (broadband) connection. That means the page first renders with
standard fonts, then snaps into the fancy downloaded ones a second after load.
It feels horrible.

~~~
arthurk
What browser are you using? I'm on Safari 4 and the page looked like this
<http://i31.tinypic.com/mvmgx0.png> until the font was downloaded (took almost
10 seconds on my slow connection).

Edit: I tried it with Firefox and it does indeed use the default font until
the new one is downloaded. The transition is not nice but better than nothing.

~~~
andreyf
Was using FF3.5, sorry for not pointing it out earlier.

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maggie
On the positive side: Fonts are really important in design and styling, and
giving designers the flexibility to use whatever fonts they won't also opens
up design doors.

It's the internet, there's always going to be stupid people using stupid
things and doing stupid things. Is that enough reason to stop other people
from doing cool things? Never.

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xenophanes
WARNING: this link crashed my mac safari 4.

Also before crashing it said the demo needs FF 3.5. So the title is wrong
about supporting safari?

~~~
Karzyn
Worked fine on mine: Safari 4.0.1, Mac OS 10.5.7

I compared it to Firefox 3.5 and it was identical.

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aw3c2
And this is how terrible it looks like in Opera on Linux:
<http://imgur.com/o1unT.png>

~~~
rarestblog
Left column, near bottom: "Technologies such as (unreadable) and Cufon... "

Wow, I never thought there would be unreadable _text_ in browser. But this day
finally came!

~~~
chime
Unreadable is 'sIFR' <http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/>

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CalmQuiet
FWIW: Although the site proclaims (dimly at top) that it appears only as
intended on FF 3.5... I find that it looks essentially identical via Safari 4.

