Web fonts, without the jank with Michael Taranto Overview of the Talk Fallback fonts. They don’t often get much of our attention, after all, they are only a fallback! But their importance is growing with a focus on user experience metrics like Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — a metric targeted at improving janky page load […]
Optimising Web Fonts to enhance Web Performance
Over the years, there has been a lot of effort in getting typography on the web right. With the advent of variable fonts, we’re already witnessing how it improves the experience and even web performance.
We’ll explore how adding modern CSS capabilities such as layout grids and custom properties in the mix truly gives us superpowers to create practical dynamic type systems that are accessible, performant and works across various screen dimensions.
Typography has been one of the great challenges in digital design, particularly on the Web. The arrival of font embedding, and services like Typekit a few years ago extended the range of fonts available to designers significantly, but came with performance costs. And while designers developed ‘responsive’ techniques for layout, responsive typography, that adapts to […]
Regular readers will know of my near fixation with embeddable/downloadable fonts on the web, as now supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10, and long supported (in a somewhat incompatible way with these other browsers) in Internet Explorer. But the technology has never taken off. Foundries and many type designers have been wary of […]
Regular readers will know the issue of embeddable/linkable fonts for the web is more than a passing interest here at Web Directions. Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the perspective of folks who design typefaces, while Jeffrey Zeldman interviews Type designer David Berlow from a similar perspective. There’s little doubt the […]
Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font embedding and standardization from a couple of months back. Why so much on this of late here? We feel at web directions that this is a development ultimately as significant as the rise of CSS for web design and development. We […]
If you want to get up to speed with the who, what, where how and when of Web fonts, this recent article by Jon Tan is the place to start.
Opera had just announced an Alpha of Opera 10, with some excellent support for new and emerging standards, including one of my favorites, font linking. Currently, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.1, and now Opera 10 support font linking via the @font-face mechanism. Internet Explorer has in fact supported this feature for many years, using the […]
For 3 decades now (indeed a little more) my life has revolved around the Web. Developing for it, developing software to help others develop for it, writing about it, teaching about it, talking about it. Curiously the last couple of weeks’ roundups have had some backwards looking aspects to them–last week we had a refresher […]
A quarter of a century ago this week, A List Apart published A Dao of Web Design, something I wrote about how to think about the web, and design for it. I’m working on a piece or two revisiting this, and have the privilege of speaking on this topic at CSS Day in June, since […]
This week we’ve got another roundup of great articles and more, across CSS, JavaScript, performance, accessibility, design, some history with an ancient website and even more ancient computer, and of course, more than a little about writing software with AI. Last week I had the privilege to record a conversation with Jeremy Howard, now of […]
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the question ‘what is Software Engineering in an age of LLMs’. So much so that I’ve started a Linkedin Group for those similar interested–so if that’s you, please come join. So this week we return to a grab bag of interesting things I came across the last week […]
Keeping up our 2025 posting streak (of now 2, but from little things…), here’s a roundup of some things we found this week we thought you might find valuable. Plenty of CSS and thoughts on architecting the Web, plus some AI for developers related articles as well, and more. Like what you see? Checkout our […]
A new (Gregorian) year has begun (while the Lunar New Year is still a couple of weeks off). I hope it has begin well with you. Since the last newsletter, I’ve posted dozens of ‘elsewheres’ over at Conffab–this newsletter usually rounds up some of the recent highlights, but you can find much more over there, […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
