I have come across quite a lot of articles recently discussing including custom fonts in web pages. With typography playing such a key role in design, it continues to be one of the major restrictions designers face when designing for the web. When the web world wide web first began the focus was on hyperlinking and allowing access to other documents but considering how far the web has come today and all that is possible, font embedding seems like a basic idea. The biggest underlying issue seems to be managing the distribution of copyrighted fonts. Sifr offers a very useful solution to the issue for the time being, allowing font replacement through the use of Flash. It is accessible across browsers and the text can be selected on the page though some minor drawbacks have been highlighted. Some of these are:

- The inability to alter kerning of the characters.

- Flash has often been criticised for its poor anti-aliasing and this can sometimes show on the rendered text.

- Sifr can be tricky to setup and get working correctly.

- Sifr fonts cannot be scaled when you change the size of font in the browser. It only changes when the page is reloaded. Some consider this quite a serious usability problem, though because Sifr is mostly used on headers and large areas of text that probably wont require scaling, this is debatable.

- It requires the user to have Flash though nowadays almost 95% of web users have this.

A convincing alternative to Sifr which I came across recently is Cufon developed by Simo Kinnunen . The aim of Cufon was to achieve the same effect as Sifr without the need for additional software. Some specific requirements were set out when it was being developed. These were:

- No plug-ins required – The font should be able to be displayed without flash and using only the users standard browser. Cufon uses javascript to render the font.

- Compatibility – It had to work on all browsers. This has been achieved with Cufon displaying correctly on IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Safari.

- Ease of use – configuration and setup for Cufon is minimal compared to Sifr.

- Cufon loads faster than Sifr with no flickering, even for larger areas of type.

Cufon works as an interface to Fontforge so it creates an SVG font based on the source font, converts it to VML(as IE only supports this), then is rendered using an engine written in javascript. The rendering engine outputs two versions of the font, one in VML shapes and one using the new HTML5 canvas tag. The font can be loaded into the file easily using the normal <script> tag. The font compresses well also for a minimal file size. The advantages are convincing, however little study has yet been done on accessibility of Cufon and scaling etc yet. Also until the issue of distributing copyrighted fonts is resolved it could be a while till custom fonts become common practice.

http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

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One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

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I write this while stranded in the Glasgow Airport BMI Business Lounge, waitng with Martin and Paul for our flight to London (now delayed by 2 hours).  We’re going down to attend the Nominet Best Practice Challenge Awards, where NSDesign are shortlisted for the “Raising Industry Standards“. 

The awards themselves are essentially about making the internet a better more accessible place, and so it’s a great pleasure for us simply being shortlisted among other giants within the industry.  Accessibility has always been at the forefront of what we do at NSDesign, so to gain some recognition for this (and other initiatives we get involved in) is fantastic.

Talking of accessibility – the European Union has just published a public survey on accessiblity, which aims to gauge the current situation with regard accessible websites, the costs/efforts associated with building them, and the affects (and improvements) they give to disabled users.  The research will all be used to determine if a broader EU law on accessibility (rather than a country by country implementation of different laws) is a better approach to take than what we currently have.  Pretty interesting stuff, and I’d encourage everyone to complete it.  It’s just a shame their own survey doesn’t meet accessibility guidelines!

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We got our hands on an apple iPod touch this week…  NICE!!!  Finally a device that provides a half-decent browsing experience on a mobile device – compared to the others (we’ve used a few here over the years) the apple blows the rest away.

Using an adapted version of Safari, browsing websites is intuitive and on the whole fairly easy.  It’s instantly obvious that some websites “work” better than others, and it’s fair to say that websites built to standards (xhtml, css and semantic markup) perform better than the usual (non-accessible) tables-based layout sites. 

We’re really quite excited about this, and will be doing some more research in the new year to identify the “best practice” for optimising a website for the touch, and of course the iPhone.  With some clever browser detection and customised CSS, it should be possible to get any website (especially the ones we develop!) to format perfectly for the smaller ipod screen, with a few automatic extras to make browsing that bit easier…  watch this space!!

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