A typeface designed using only CSS3 | Hacker News Reader

A typeface designed using only CSS3

desandro.com

65 pointsgrinich13 comments

Aww jeez this sucks. Version of the same concept, work in progress: http://nathanhackett.com/front.html

Serves me right for not launching earlier. Anyway kudos, very impressive. He's taken a similar approach to me, generalising the common letter shapes into sets of css rules. Mine's designed to allow for image or gradient textures on the letters, and degrades gracefully on older browsers (loses its curves!). His is way prettier though.

Could definitely be useful for hiding email addresses while leaving it completely readable.

The text is still readable by bots. Turn off CSS on the demo page.

Only because he actually includes the text in the outer span tag. It's entirely unnecessary for display purposes. Remove that, and bots would have to do OCR.

Each character is wrapped in a <span> tag. I would imagine most address collector bots don't bother to actually parse HTML, so they would be thrown off by that.

Of course, if that's the case, then the <span> trick can be used on its own without a CSS font at all.

Amazing. Check out his other stuff too, this guy is some kind of crazy browser genius. And I mean that in the greatest possible way.

Agreed. And some folks who don't actually make anything get so much publicity.

They make themselves public, that's doing something.

Cool stuff. He obviously said it wasn't intended for production, but the major issue that comes to mind is SEO since engines won't see the text as actual text. Really cool proof of concept though.

Not being able to select/copy text is pretty annoying too.

You can copy the text. It just doesn't have the outline to show you what's selected. Which is quite annoying, yes.

Search engines will see the actual text, it's just hidden with CSS. You can see it when you turn off CSS (Firefox: view -> page style -> no style).

Missed that, thanks for the heads up! Now my only issue would be that the text-indent: -9999em method has been known to get you flagged for spam for obvious reasons.

But I'm being facetious. I like to play devil's advocate. :o)

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