Compatibility
Posted on 03 Apr 2006 under Site Designing
It’s annoying… just when you find some good feature or effect or script you’d like to use on your website, you find out that certain browsers have compatibility issues with it… AARGH! The other day I discovered that Firefox happily obliges when it comes to all the cool CSS effects, but Internet Explorer pisses on the CSS parade 
And today, I try embedding a font (succesfully, too I might add) only to find that while IE welcomes Font Embedding with open arms, Firefox crinks up its nose and looks the other way. Damn! Well, I suppose this is what an amateur webmaster’s life is all about… finding the right compromise and making do with all the limited resources and effects available.
However, I really do fail to understand why browsers have stopped supporting font-embedding. Even if it required the browser to pre-load the font, most font files take barely 20-30kb… the size of a medium-big JPEG image… or even if we only had to pre-load the glyphs for the characters used, it would take even less space and less time to pre-load… sigh…
I still feel you must have screwed up somewhere. Because Opera & to somewhat extent Firefox are the king of CSS and IE GOD damn sucks in this department.
So find your mistakes
No, I did some research on this… apparently, Firefox and Opera have never supported font embedding. Once upon a time (at the time of the launch of IE 4), this showed great potential and promise, but somehow, with the development of Flash, it got left behind. I hope in the near future, someone tries to develop it further and make in attractive enough for all major browsers to incorporate.
The alternative is to use dynamically generated GIF files to render your font, found a pretty cool article on this while searching for exactly the same thing (after also being disappointed with Firefox not supporting it), take a look: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext
It requires PHP4.3 or higher and a GD library compiled for PHP, sorting out my GD library before attempting it. Just to show how powerful it is, here’s an example I use in all my forum signature, it’s dynamically generated playlist from last.fm in GIF format: http://imagegen.last.fm/Awesome35/recenttracks/5/jmostert.gif
Since your article was written in 2006, I’m assuming you’re not a beginner anymore? I’m just starting out the discovery of how horrible IE6 really is
Oooh, thanks for the heads-up, Reaper!
I’ll read those articles in detail later, as I’ve suddenly begun to get inundated with work in college and otherwise.
Oh, and I’m still a beginner, since I’ve had so less time to work on web-designing
Hi nice post, i have come across your site once before when searching for something so i was just wondering something. I love your theme, would it happen to be a free one i can download, or is it a custom one you had made? In a few weeks i will be launching my own site, i’m not great with designs but i really like the style of your site so it would be cool if i could find (or pay for) something with a similar look.
Thanks!