
The state of web typography today, available techniques with their pros and cons - vitobotta
http://vitobotta.com/web-typography-techniques-usability-performance-seo-security/
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Sephr
Why is this split into _7 pages_? I could understand maybe splitting it up
into 3 pages to get more pageviews, but this is just going to irritate of
every single one of their readers. Not to mention that the article fails to
address the very significant issue of font rendering, and how bad it can be on
Windows without ClearType enabled or special hinting larger font sizes (which
is resolved in IE9 and Firefox 4, neither of which are released yet).

~~~
vitobotta
Believe me, I don't like pagination either - and I really mean it, but I
thought that a single page or fewer pages would be too long to read, and I
also thought it would be easier to organise the information in distinct
sections.

Next time I will reduce the number of pages though, if feedbacks like yours
suggest that I do so :)

As for the font rendering issues, I did mention -although briefly- the
<https://github.com/MichaelvanLaar/Webfont-Load-Enhancer> library, as a
possible solution to improve the web font experience on Windows. Did you mean
this or something else?

Thanks a lot for your feedback ;)

~~~
thomaspaine
I think Sephr is referring to the fact that many fonts look absolutely
terrible on versions of Windows that don't have font smoothing enabled, namely
XP. We almost threw out using custom fonts after we saw what our website
looked like in XP.

I wrote up an article not too long ago about how we worked around this, which
I feel weird mentioning because I just posted this on another thread like two
days ago, but oh well:

[http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-
standa...](http://dev.codio.com/graceful-degradation-for-non-web-standard-fon)

~~~
Sephr
I was referring to that, _and_ the inadequate font smoothing at large font
sizes even with ClearType on. It was fixed in Windows 7, but no browsers
except for IE9 use the new text writing API that takes advantage of the better
smoothing. I have edited my comment to be a little less ambiguous.

~~~
vitobotta
Uhm, weird, I meant to reply to you but for some reason the reply link which I
could see and use now didn't show up before (?)

~~~
apu
There's a progressive delay in showing the "reply" button on longer threads.
This is meant to prevent long flamewars (and it certainly seems to help).

~~~
vitobotta
Thanks apu, that makes sense. I am kind of new around here, so I hadn't
noticed that yet.

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jcromartie
Just to be honest: the design of the site makes me want to ignore whatever
advice it might contain. It doesn't really scream "I know a lot about great
looking typography, layout, or web design."

~~~
vitobotta
I hope you read the post anyway despite the looks of my blog :D and if you are
available for hire to redesign it and make it prettier, and won't cost me a
fortune, let me know! :)

At the very beginning of the post, before anything else, I said that I am not
a designer but a _developer_. I even admitted that "I may sometimes struggle
to choose two colors that fit well together" ! :)

I actually explained that I have written the post on usability, SEO,
performance and security aspects of techniques for web typography currently
available; I do believe that many "designers", instead, often just care about
the looks of what they do, while completely ignoring the issues mentioned in
the post. Either because they don't care, or more likely because many, if not
most, "designers" just lack for what I can see the kind of basic technical
knowledge on usability/accessibility, SEO, performance, and security required
to even understand those issues. I don't think that being able to make a
stunning layout out of a PSD makes anybody, say, a "complete" designer.

As for the purely aesthetic aspects of the techniques I've mentioned, or of
anything related to web design in general, I haven't even touched them,
because I wouldn't have much to say.

So I am sad that the very basic layout of my blog has perhaps distracted you
-and possibly others- from the contents of that post. I should perhaps get a
designer to make a proper custom template for me so to avoid this in the
future, since I plan on writing more on "non-aesthetic" aspects of web design
:)

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vitobotta
Thanks to both for the clarification. I will take a chance to test this more
in detail with a couple of virtual machines (since I use Mac) perhaps tomorrow
or as soon as I have some time; does the library I liked here and in the post
solve the issue? I admit I tested it quickly (say 5 minutes or less) with
Windows VMs, but at that time everything looked OK to me using that library,
since the custom web fonts were disabled (and replaced with the closest
similar web-safe fonts) on for example Windows XP with Clear Type switched off
so avoid the bad rendering in those conditions.

