Noscope is a bi-weekly journal serving up snacksized portions of pointless stuff since 2001. On a new linode server!
I also do freelance design and usability via dejligt.com

CSS3 Web Fonts Arrives With Firefox 3.1?

    22:04 on January 8, 2009 ,

Smashing Magazine annoys me to no end with their formulaic blogging. Once in a while though, nuggets of worthwhile float to the top, in this case, a rather visual look at how CSS3 can make a webdesigners life easier. Pay attention to the mention of the CSS3 @font-face property which would allow us to to embed a large number of fonts across—behold—Safari, Opera 10, Firefox 3.1 and IE7. That’s essentially all the browsers I care about. Does that mean we can actually start using fonts early this year? This seems like a big deal, or that someone made a mistake…

As an addition, here’s a list of fonts that explicitly allow embedding.

Comments

  1. James John Malcolm says:
    January 8, 2009 at 22:36

    Well, the article falls down at the end:

    “Percentage-wise, the W3′s browser statistics indicate that, as of November 2008, 44.2% of users across the Web were browsing with Firefox, 3.1% with Chrome and 2.7% with Safari. That means almost 50% of all Internet users should be able to view these features.”

    That’s utter rubbish. W3 School’s sample is incredibly scewed. Far less “50% of all Internet users” are on non-IE browsers on average.

    That said, the future looks beautiful but, thankfully, still with plenty of IE fixing.

  2. Joen says:
    January 9, 2009 at 10:25

    What I’m reading you saying is that it is true, Firefox 3.1 + IE7 + Safari will read fonts, if I can only manage to find both an OTF and convert that to EOT?

    Bring on Firefox 3.1!

  3. Ben says:
    January 9, 2009 at 10:47

    I’ve just tried that test page in IE6 and it works (albeit unreadable in places because I don’t have cleartype turned on) – but it doesn’t work at all in IE8 beta…

  4. Joen says:
    January 9, 2009 at 12:19

    Ack, you can’t count on Microsoft for anything. It seems font-face really isn’t in IE8 Standards Mode, even for EOT files.

    That said, one chap somewhere on Channel 9 points out this:

    Note that they do still work in IE7 mode, so as a work-around you can use the meta approach to specify you want IE7 rendering for that page. Of course you won’t get the new rendering engine features that way, but WEFT will still work.

    So if you’re willing to sacrifice the hopefully improved CSS rendering engine in IE8, you can hack your way through it. On the other hand, people have a harder time upgrading IE than they do Firefox and Safari. So we’ll probably have to design for IE7 for a long while any way.