webbedENVIRONMENTS
The Intersection of Technology, Culture, and Politics

We have gotten some great feedback from designers wanting to help the W3C set the standards for the future of Web typography, but we’re still looking for more. If you participate in any design forums or are a blogger yourself, we would appreciate a mention using the permalink for the Web Typography discussion.

I’d also like to quickly answer a few questions that have come up in the discussion:

• Yes, we are also following the discussion of the CSS Public discussion forum, www-style. However, we are hoping to get input here from designers who may be reluctant to participate in a more technical forum.
• For backwards compatibility reasons, we can’t make changes to the font attribute. Adding anything new to the syntax would break in older browsers.

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• We can not control how browsers behave when it comes to the consistency of how font sizes or colors are rendered. You’ll need to badger the browser and the OS makers.
• Independent control of fall-back fonts is a great idea! Now we just need to figure out a simple syntax for doing that.
• Firefox 3 supports both kerning and ligatures on all platforms. I haven’t had a chance to check it out myself, but we’ll probably use that as the basis for the spec.
• furniture VidenovSynthesized fonts are being considered in the new specification.
• Webkit is allowingfilling text with an image and we are looking at that for the specification.
• A character pseudo-element is an intriguing idea. Anybody else see a use for that one? Let us know.

That’s all for now. Keep those comments coming.

I am sooooo tired of my mouse. Move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click-click-move. We’ve been using mice for almost 25 years now while movies like Minority Report have shown us a glimpse of a future where all you have to do is wave your hands around a bit to get the job done (OK, you also have to live with Tom Cruze in a distopian future (OK, some might argue that we already are living with Tom Cruze in a distopian future)). Yes, there are some extremely big expensive systems thate promise to do some cool things, but we need something cheap and portable.

The portfolio for Publicis & Hal Riney are taking us into the future with a Flash site that allows you to navigate with hand gestures using your Web cam. Just move your hand over certain "hot spots" in front of your computer (shown in a handy mini-window on the bottom right of the screen) and you can move around their portfolio to see their ideas, news, and examples of their work. It may not be replacing your mouse anytime soon, but it’s still pretty cool.

To everyone who is getting the “This site may harm your computer” message, when you search in Google or try to load the pages, I am profoundly sorry. Someone was able to exploit a bug in WordPress that allowed them (I say “them” although it was probably some automated bot) to add invisible links pointing to their gambling, insurance, porn, and/or other disreputable site where malware might be installed. However, I couldn’t see any of these links except in the code since thery were being hidden using noscript tags and css display:none code.

I don’t believe any one was ever at risk (since they were hidden, the links could not be clicked) and I have removed all of the offending code, turned off the feature being exploited (which involved posting using email) and installed the latest version of WordPress.

Unfortunately this site was flagged by StopBadware.org, which Google and others use to try and stamp out malware. Although StopBadware has no current active warning for webbedENVIRONMENTS, Google picked up that there was a potential issue, and I have to wait to be re-reviewed before they clear me. I do not know how long that will take or how long it will take for Google to take the warning down.

This is very embarrassing, not to mention irritating and time wasting. Although nothing is certain in life, I’ve spent the last day cleaning up, and believe that I have rooted out all of the issues. If you notice anything strange–other than the Google message–please let me know.

Thanks, and I’m sorry for any inconvenience.

The W3C is getting ready to set the new standards for typography on the Web, and we need your help.

A few weeks ago, while at the W3C CSS Work Group Face-To-Face meeting in San Diego, I volunteered, to be the advocate for several of the CSS 3 Modules. For the third version of Cascading Style Sheets, the Work Group had decided that, rather than trying to release one big document, they would release the CSS 3 specification in smaller modular chunks. As an advocate for parts of the overall CSS 3 specifications, I work to push my chosen modules through from a working draft to a full blown recommendation. It’s kind of like taking a bill through the US Congress, only with more transparency. I decided to take on the four issues which were going seemingly  unnoticed by the rest of the group, but I believe will have a profound impact on the work we do as Web designers: CSS Basic UI, CSS Hyperlink Presentation, CSS Fonts, and CSS Web Fonts. It’s a lot of work, so I’ll be concentrating on the Font Modules first.

After that meeting, I got in contact with John Daggett of The Mozilla organization who volunteered to co-edit the CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts specifications with me. Seeing as he is responsible for working on the graphic and font implementations in Mozilla, he was a welcome addition.

So, what’s the difference between CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts except for the word “Web”? Let me tell you about them:

• The CSS Fonts module defines how type is displayed on the page; which font is used, it’s size, and how it is styled (bold, italics, small-caps, etc…). Font styles effect how the individual glyphs are displayed whereas text styles (such as underline) and applied evenly across all glyphs.
• The CSS Web Fonts module details how you download a font file for use in a Web page, just like you would download images. It also includes the ability to better match fonts for your design with those that are available to the end-user or even synthesize them on the fly.

Why not just treat these two specifications under one document to cover how fonts are used on Web pages? There is no real semantic reason to keep them separate, but unfortunately there are some logistical and technical reasons.  How fonts will be downloaded for Web page use is being hotly debated in regards to how to protect fonts from improper use. Our worry is that by tying the two modules together, we might hold up the deployment of the basic CSS Font specification–for which there is relatively little contention–while the more disputed CSS Web Fonts specifications are debated.

The CSS Work Group is meeting in late August, and John and I will be presenting our revisions for both of these modules. We would appreciate your input especially if you are a designer working in CSS and HTML.

In the comments section of this blog, tell me what you think are some of the font styles and features missing from the current specification. What do you expect to be able to do with typography on your Web pages that you can not do now? What are you doing now with kludges that you would like to see simpler ways of doing? Keep in mind that we are talking about font properties and how to style the characters. This includes things like bold, italic, and even outline and emboss which effect how each glyph is rendered. It does not include styles that area applied over an entire block of text such as underlining or rotating text. Those are in different modules.

Also, let me know what you think about some of the new additions to the Fonts specification (font-size-adjust, font-stretch, font-effect, and font-smooth) and any problems you have with the current specifications.

Try to be as specific as possible, and provide examples and links if you can. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Web design community comes up with!

Next June (sometime between June 10th and June 13th to be more precise) I will be presenting a session on Web Typography at the Voices the Matter Conference to be held in Nashville, TN. The conference, run by the book publisher New Riders, brings together some of their top authors for a four day lovefest of everything Web design. This is my first time at the conference (of course, this is only the second VTM conference) but it looks pretty exciting, with some authors I know well and others I’m looking forward to meeting.

If you want to attend, you can register before May 2nd and save $200 and (just because I’m a sweet guy) you can use my special promo code at ANY time to save another $200. Use the priority code WDDSPKR during registration to save $200 on any of the packages.

I hope to see you there.