Gentium & Bitstream Vera

Through CSS @font-face Firefox 3.5 adds the ability to download a TrueType font from the webserver. All web designers shall henceforth therefore incorporate all redistributable fonts into their library! :-)

Unfortunately, very few creators of fonts have been so generous to license their intellectual property as open source; blessed are Gentium and Bitstream Vera.

Giving preference and favor to using fonts in web design which are free for redistribution through the @font-face means can lighten the download weight of a webpage, and bring increased flexibility, by enabling your CSS/HTML builder to put copy directly in the HTML instead of only in raster image formats.

width one thousand

2008 is the year of affordable 1440x900 screens for new PC buyers, but what is the display resolution of your audience?

75% of web users now have 1024x768 screens, so we can leave designing for 800x600 in the dust. But if you craft a website more than a thousand pixels wide, how much of your audience will you lose?

My read of w3schools' statistics leads me to think it's about two-thirds. So, whenever your graphic designer hands you a template exceeding 1024x768, push back. Just because s/he has dual 1440px wide screens is no excuse to inconvenience >half of your users.

Addendum: Drag this 1024 link from the page onto your Bookmarks Toolbar to create a "bookmarklet" that will resize your browser to 1024px.

Google Chrome

This week Google went public with its secret Chrome gBrowser desktop application for Windows. Long incubated in hiding, it was born slightly premature - allegedly because the comic ad seeped out early.

We have all seen its CSS rendering before in Safari; the Chrome browser is built on Webkit (Apple's fork of the KDE's "KHTML" rendering engine used originally in the KDE Konqueror).  But its Javascript virtual machine, dubbed "V8," is brand new! Developed internally by Google team including Lars Bak (VM pioneer and former technical lead of Sun's Java VM HotSpot project) and Kasper Lund, it was opensourced under the BSD license. Google plans to port V8 to every major desktop OS, including Mac and Linux, and also of course to Android, which is launching soon on the T-Mobile/HTC Dream phone, just in time for the holiday sales.

The V8 VM competes directly with Microsoft Silverlight, Apple's SquirrelFish, Mozilla's TraceMonkey and Tamarin,  and indirectly with Sun's Java Virtual Machine (the granddaddy!), and Perl Parrot (incubating for a decade?).

Although the 800lb gorilla in the room is not innovating with these little guys, Internet Explorer is following close enough behind to keep market share. The Rest Of The World is competing for performance increases and technical advancement (and yes, for paltry market percentage points) in a way that will open up new possibilities for cloud-based web apps.

Everyone knows a paradigm shift will throw down the reigning king of the hill, and that one of those comes every now and again. Until then, the arts & sciences are advancing, which is a win for consumers, developers, and the American dream. Carpe diem.