This week Steve cohabitates and stuff.

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Watch Steve shoot lasers and talk some bidness.

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Facebook and the great change – Tres. “Like” our Facebook page to see future episodes…come on, just do it! http://www.facebook.com/fgsquared

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Steve shreds and talks Facebook.

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Facebook and the great change.

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Steve talks about evolution and how we spend our time on this earth. “Like” our Facebook page to see future episodes…come on, just do it! http://www.facebook.com/fgsquared

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Steve talks about heaven & hell and quadrants: http://www.facebook.com/fgsquared “Like” our Facebook page to see future episodes…come on, just do it!

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Steve talks about survival and cultural shifts. Check it out and then “Like” our Facebook page to see future episodes…come on, just do it! http://www.facebook.com/fgsquared?sk=wall

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In a post I wrote nearly a year ago, I discussed the technological advances that have made the Web a more aesthetically pleasing place to visit. One of the more recent (at the time) advances was web fonts. Let’s look at how that’s progressing.

On one hand, you could say we’re almost there, that the web could soon have an appearance more like a glossy magazine than an old ATM terminal. You could even make the argument that the web already should look like that. After all, technologies exist and are implemented more or less across all browsers. But there are still barriers, and they have less to do with technology than with issues such as licensing, uniform presentation, and the eternal frustration of a continuing IE6 user base.

I’m considering @font-face with WOFF and EOT as the preferred method and format of web font implementation. This is unquestionably the best, most promising method for achieving wide internet adoption of web font technology currently available. It is by no means the only method.

Licensing

Contrary to what you might think, fonts are copyrighted material managed under licensed agreements. Unless expressly stated otherwise, you pay for the use of a font, or more precisely the installation of the font on a computer. With web fonts, when a visitor comes to your website, the font used in the page either has to be already installed on their visitor’s computer or has to be downloaded and installed to display correctly. That installation typically breaks existing license agreements.

Font foundries and distributors have started amending their licensing agreements to allow for web font usage. It’s not perfect yet, and the possibility for font piracy through web page display still remains a sticky issue for font designers, who rightly deserve to get compensated for their hard work. However, current thinking tends to be to let the technology move forward and the market will adjust and react as necessary over time, rather than start suing anyone and everyone (I’m looking at you RIAA).

Uniform Presentation

Even though web fonts work—and work well—in nearly all browsers (more on that in a moment), there are still some differences in how the fonts end up getting rendered and displayed. This is due to different browsers requiring different font formats, and also from how different operating systems render text, i.e. Mac OS or Windows. The number of possible viewing environments gets large enough that it becomes difficult to code for a guaranteed uniform presentation of the content.

For the most part, this is a minor issue. Where this becomes most evident as a problem is where text wraps for line length. There are few good solutions for avoiding widows and awkward line breaks, or getting finely-tuned letter spacing on the web at this point, though no doubt that will come in time.

Moving past IE6

This will probably come as a huge shock to you, but web fonts and IE6 are pretty much exclusive of each other.

It probably isn’t necessary for me to spell this out, but IE6 remains an enormous barrier to the adoption of web fonts because a designer would still have to create a completely separate design for IE6, and then code it. All of which is in addition to the design and development of the non-IE6, web font-friendly version. If you’re going to the trouble of creating a site targeted at IE6, that looks great anyway, why not just use that version for all browsers and save time and money?

IE9, Firefox, Chrome and Safari all support web fonts (as do IE7 and IE8 with extremely simple code hacks). When more people, especially large enterprise companies, finally start to switch from IE6 as their browser, you’ll start to see a more beautiful web. As with all things large and corporate, it will just take more time.

( Photo Credit: stewf )

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