Re: Downloadable fonts and image replacement

Hello W3.
First I'm glad this subject is not forgotten.

As a type designer I'd say
1 security
2 subsets
3 rendering control

1 & 2 speak for themselves, I'd like to get some attention for rendering
control.
Currently there IS a good way to embed fonts in websites, and have cross
platform control over rendering at the same time.
It works so well, and is so successful that there are loads of great fonts
and even foundries offering fonts just for the purpose of embedding in web
sites.
There is even special software to make such fonts. A cool web site seems to
have its own interface font(s) these days.
The key to this success is that one can display these fonts without
smoothing and subpixel shit. 
Good old plain square pixels.
So, that is probably a point where the browser needs some extra flexibility.
In the html code I'd want to define ppm size and sometimes point size, and
stuff like: no smoothing/standard smoothing/subpixel smoothing, maybe with
"allowed" or "forced" as properties.
Or whatever smoothing variations browsers should support these days.
But without "no smoothing" you better forget the whole idea :-)
Flash fonts should just work, even without the tiny overlap needed to get
the fuzz out of flash.

Ah, when I am at it, it was always possible to make tiny gifs and scale them
in the html; one, two, three or twenty times, which looked cool, sharp big
pixels. Until some fuzzy browser on a full fuzz OS started smoothing such
scaled gifs. :-( That was not the idea.
So, please define "no smoothing" for images as well.

Fonts and images with "no smoothing" should only be scaled in whole numbers
by the browser, for bad eyes and ultra high resolution screens. The web
designer needs to be sure there won't be half pixels when whole ones are
defined.

Best regards,

Luc(as) de Groot

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2006 12:39:41 UTC