The state of web typography today, available techniques with their pros and cons | Hacker News Reader

The state of web typography today, available techniques with their pros and cons

vitobotta.com

20 pointsvitobotta10 comments

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).

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 ;)

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...

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.

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 (?)

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).

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

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."

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 :)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com