No, I wasn’t drunk writing this post, just had a long hot shower.
No, you don’t need new specs, this text is slightly blurred.
Scrubbing my back I was thinking about the new CSS3 stuff, and what you can do about spicing up the layout.
After my hot shower, steam filling my bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror, razor-blade in hand to deliver a fast and clean shave.
Stop!
No shaving in the mist, no blood in the tub, but EUREKA
Fuzzy fonts with CSS!
Microsoft has applied to join the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Scalable Vector Graphics working group. I would say ten years to late, but they did it. So will all the examples on this site work in Explorer soon. I hope, but I fear not. Let’s explain that to you.
One of the reasons I write critically about Microsoft is that they’re trying to slowdown internet innovation, probably best illustrated by the so called Embrace, extend and extinguish strategy, which had the purpose to extend open standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
As a consequence, and another big reason I don’t like Microsoft, they push the time and costs of developing websites by approximately 40%. Simply because you have to write your JavaScript twice, can’t use modern CSS and lose a lot of time fixing lay-out bugs. That’s the price the world is paying for the Microsoft dominance in the browser market. Other estimations go about 20-30%, the well know Dutch developer PPK on quirksmode “Want a site that works perfectly in IE6? Fine, but it’ll cost you about 20 to 30% extra.”. (Costs of JavaScript libraries are excluded here).
I think Microsoft used that strategy and I think they were successful. Actually Microsoft stopped developing their browser form 2001 till 2007. Second thought: there is only one way that Microsoft will change that strategy, loss of market share. That didn’t really happen, at least not on a big scale, seems that most consumers don’t even know the word browser, Explorer worked out of the box, the blue e on your windows desktop was a synonym for internet, and Opera or Firefox a program for hackers or activists. Most sites used Activex, or other proprietary JavaScript, so a lot of sites didn’t work in Opera, actually they were designed (deliberately) to only work in Internet Explorer.
Now Google (and to a lesser extent Apple) entered the browser-market, things are starting to change. At least the web is gonna change: sites do not longer contain information, they contain applications.
And when you use web-applications, you don’t need them as a stand-alone program. That’s the danger for Microsoft. It’s not new, it has always been there and Microsoft knew. That’s why they made their browser `a critical part of their operating system`, technically nonsense, but they reached their goal. I took the EC a few years to refute that claim, a few years Microsoft made a lot of money.
Why didn’t Microsoft embrace SVG earlier. Well they developed Vector Markup Language (VML) during the nineties. That didn’t became a standard, so I guess they decided to stop doing anything for 5 years. Now Microsoft gained some substantial marketshare with Silverlight, a Flash/SVG comparable technology, which it’s used a lot for streaming Media lately, they probably think let’s join the SVG working group to – these are my words – see if we can slowdown their activities.
Will we see SVG support in Explorer 9. I bet not!
UPDATE
I was totally wrong. There is SVG support in Explorer 9.
I can take my loss, it makes me happy to see Microsoft embrace webstandards 🙂
I always liked Opera’s support for SVG, and I really welcomed their initiative to treat SVG as any other image type, like jpg or gif or png. After all SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a vector-image mark up language (XML), like Flash or Silverlight but free and it’s an Open Standard.
Round corners, gradients, multi-image background, watermarks, nearly everything (animation?) can be handled by SVG, so it’s quite a powerful feature. Creating a dataURL of SVG is possible, so creating a CSS file with several gradient backgrounds, round borders is indeed a very efficient way of designing webpages. It’s cached, and although the initial css file is a bit heavier, no extra server requests are needed to load additional images. It’s fast, lean and flexible.
I’m glad to see Google Chrome as the first other main browser join Opera in support for SVG images as backgrounds in CSS declarations.
SVG support as background image in Google Chrome
Chrome’s implementation isn’t without errors, see what happens if you start scrolling the webpage in the brand new Chrome for Linux beta, but is a start. I hope Mozilla/Firefox and Apple/Webkit will follow soon.
Google Chrome rendering issues SVG background
I’ve given up expectations for Microsoft Explorer, see my other post. To be short: they wanna sell their Silverlight.
I’m not without any hope, :), I hope Internet Explorer users will start using other webstandard compliant browsers and consequently MS marketshare will drop significantly. Only then they probably will convert to an attitude of supporting and promoting open standards.
Another example of using SVG-object as background-images for HTML elements.
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Metus massa eros ipsum consequat et dui id ligula sem nibh. Et ut malesuada Maecenas pede Cum fames Ut non convallis Quisque. Vitae nibh porttitor orci nisl semper vitae justo orci Curabitur eu. Elit quis condimentum ridiculus dictumst quis laoreet tempus consectetuer lacus vel. Lorem wisi porttitor sollicitudin auctor id ipsum tempus libero nec.
Use it at your own risk!
Consider yourself lucky if it serves any accessible and well-formatted content on the web and always be aware you could miss something: you can’t expect seeing colors on a black and white TV.
Internet Explorer 7 is a bit better, and 8 is a bit better again, although it’s compatibility setting is a big lie. Designers don’t design websites for browsers, they program following rules and according to international webstandards. Unfortunately sometimes (=always in case of Internet Explorer)) you have to patch a site to work well in browsers. Historically Internet Explorer doesn’t comply to those web-standards.
IMHO the costs of website-design is raised by approximately 50% due to weak standards support by Internet Explorer. I guess that worldwide loss is bigger than the cost of the financial crises in autumn 2009. Billions of euros.
Compare it with an added translation in Microsofts gibberish of several pages to every plain English written book, magazine or newspaper. Nobody wants that, but on the web it’s a fact.
Microsoft is selling an Operating System, they don’t like advanced web-applications: it makes their core business obsolete. So they try to slowdown innovation. And they try to push proprietary standards as Video-encoding techniques and Silverlight: we can use it only if we pay Microsoft and buy their software.
You wonder why sensible people are using Explorer at all. Probably they’re ignorant. It’s simply pre-installed. The same reason the crisis hit that hard: My bank offered me a mortgage, I thought I could trust my bank. Well, they make money and we pay the bill.
Lets try to redefine the generic fonts with a webfont @font-face definition.
We change:
<style>
@font-face {
src: url(http://dev.webonomic.nl/fonts/Pinewood.ttf);
font-family: 'serif';
}
@font-face {
src: url(http://dev.webonomic.nl/fonts/Pinocchio.ttf);
font-family: 'sans-serif';
}
@font-face {
src: url(http://dev.webonomic.nl/fonts/rothenbg.ttf);
font-family: monospace;
}
@font-face {
src: url(http://dev.webonomic.nl/fonts/DevinneSwash.ttf);
font-family: 'fantasy';
}
</style>
Nec tristique scelerisque, fringilla, cras eget proin. Fames, justo. Dui nisl ad nisi orci lectus curabitur scelerisque vitae. Metus tortor, scelerisque. Adipiscing tellus orci, magnis. Maecenas nullam. Eleifend. In, at enim habitasse dictum, lacinia, auctor.
Nec tristique scelerisque, fringilla, cras eget proin. Fames, justo. Dui nisl ad nisi orci lectus curabitur scelerisque vitae. Metus tortor, scelerisque. Adipiscing tellus orci, magnis. Maecenas nullam. Eleifend. In, at enim habitasse dictum, lacinia, auctor.
style=”font-family:fantasy” Nec tristique scelerisque, fringilla, cras eget proin. Fames, justo. Dui nisl ad nisi orci lectus curabitur scelerisque vitae. Metus tortor, scelerisque. Adipiscing tellus orci, magnis. Maecenas nullam. Eleifend. In, at enim habitasse dictum, lacinia, auctor.
Nec tristique scelerisque, fringilla, cras eget proin. Fames, justo. Dui nisl ad nisi orci lectus curabitur scelerisque vitae. Metus tortor, scelerisque. Adipiscing tellus orci, magnis. Maecenas nullam. Eleifend. In, at enim habitasse dictum, lacinia, auctor.
It seems we were successful: Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.0 will redefine generic fonts! But we cheated, it happens only when they’re quoted.
Although font-family names are strings and strings should be handled the same if they are unquoted, double or single quoted, it’s different for generic families.
Generic font names aren’t string but keywords, quoted keywords are strings, so generic font names should never be quoted.
Unquoted generic names are not redefined as is shown by monospace
Opera does not redefine the fonts in any case. Chrome and Safari are right here. Firefox behavior is wrong. It let redefine generic fonts by type string, but called as keywords.
Update: Somehow there is inconsistent behavior. Firefox 3.5.3 acts diffently on Linux or XP. Also caching seems to be confusing.
