The Future of Web Typography

Version 10 of the Opera web browser was released today, and it’s kind of a big deal.

The reason it’s such a big deal is not really anything to do with Opera. I’ve never really thought much of the little browser, to be honest. I’ve always found the UI to be a little clunky, any time I’ve trialled using it as my main browser, it’s failed to remember usernames and passwords that I’ve asked it to remember, and overall I just find it frustrating. Sure, version 10 is a big improvement, but it’s still not my bag. Firefox and all of its extensions is just too useful, so I’m unlikely to change.

That’s not the point.

The point is that with this release, Opera now supports the @font-face CSS property. And so does the latest version of Safari. And Chrome. And Firefox. That’s all of the major browsers except for one.

OK, so it’s a big one that’s missing—Internet Explorer. However, IE does support embedded fonts using a proprietary format. And that’s where a service like Typekit can come in and offer hosted fonts, and do so in a legal way that successfully navigates all of the licenses that currently make hosted fonts a massive legal minefield.

I had a chance to play around with the beta of Typekit, and wrote about it in my latest web column for Desktop magazine. If you haven’t bought the magazine, you can read my article online for free, if you like.

Incidentally, this is my last web column for Desktop. Working full-time as well as being a husband and a dad takes a fair amount of my time, so I’m in the process of dropping a few extra-curricular activities here and there to do those things properly.

Writing the web column has been fun, and I may contribute occasional articles in the future. But I’m very happy to hand the mantle over to John Allsopp from the Web Directions team. John’s very passionate about the web, very knowledgeable, and a much more widely published writer than myself, so I’m sure he’ll do a great job.

posted: 02.09. 2009, 22:13 (0)