Slashdot Mirror

For the record, I've seen it once or twice; usually it was flaky DNS and a client that didn't cache properly. If you can't resolve images.slashdot.org, for instance, you have to wait a second or two until you can resolve it. Telling the browser to cache CSS pages "for a long time" doesn't often help, because in the event of failure, all that got cached after the delay is "503 - there ain't no images.slashdot.org", and if the DNS failure was transient, that's worse, because, the browser isn't necessarily gonna retry!

But to answer the meta-question, yes, it was brought up as a pathological example to illustrate the principle that requiring dozens of TCP/IP connections to multiple hosts (www.foo.com, images.foo.com, css.foo.com, a dozen "providers" of ads, assuming those aren't already pre-emptively blocked) equals more ways for things to fail.

> Because a) you were fine with the font size that was trendy with designers a decade ago and b) you aren't fine with the font size that is trendy with designers today.

That'd be fine! Tongue-in-cheek, I'd just make it "one <font size> smaller" or "one <font size> bigger". It seems that what's trendy with designers today is either (a) fonts that render as 4x6 pixel globs, or (b) font choices that show up as 8x12-pixel hugeness (1920x1600, 96dpi), with no middle ground. What's trendy with designers seems to be "whatever's either too big or too small, use anything but the default!", which makes no sense to me.

> No, the problem is incompetence. There's no make-this-unreadable: extra-web-2.0 !important CSS property, the defaults are sensible and CSS is explicitly designed for end-user control. The problem is that designers are choosing to make their designs this way. Sure, with one hand tied behind their back they aren't able to fuck things up in precisely the same way as they can today, but that's not the point is it?

No argument there. Georgia's a great font, but I'd rather see things fall back to Times Roman, where at least it looks half-decent at all sizes on all platforms. This guy's rant from 7 years ago puts it better than I did.

Here's another article with some screenshots that illustrate the problem. Those screenshots don't look too bad... but the differences would be greatly magnified at even one "font size" smaller. Augh.

I call BS on that link (Joel on Software) -- the author is not an expert on fonts and he flip flops on this topic in blog posts that are less than 24 hours apart.

I also call BS on Apple's so-called 'philosophy' of how fonts should look - that line is came from either their marketing department or their fan base.

The Reason the "preserve the font design" claim is BS:

• The claim is, that Apple is attempting to be true to the font's design
• Safari renders Georgia/Verdana/Tahoma (everything) with the same fuzziness compared to Window's crisp look
• As you can see here and here, Microsoft was responsible for the design of these fonts (they hired the designer to create them for the specific purpose of on-screen readability)
• So if Apple is trying to be true to the font's design, how come they don't render these fonts exactly the same way as Windows? Windows rendition should be the reference in this case.

The Reason "its supposed to be closer to what it looks like in print" is BS:

• When doing work that is intended for print, you would be using something like photoshop, or pagemaker or any one of the many graphics or desktop publishing softwares out there
• S/w intended for this purpose does it's own font rendering - it doesn't rely on the OS for this
• At all other times you are using s/w that is intended for the screen first and foremost, and print next (for example, I print less than 0.01% of the web pages I visit, practically never print anything that comprises the menus or other UI elements, print less than 0.001% of my email, docs, code, IM conversations, etc. etc.
• Even allowing for the Mac's heritage with desktop publishing and graphic design -- the average Mac user probably prints less than 20% (less than 1 in 5) of the things she views on the Mac's screen
• That being the case, the 80% use-case is blindingly obvious -- Apple knows exactly what to optimize for (or at least they should)

Yet, they do nothing to improve their font rendering and their fan base continues to defend their inexplicable choices (as seen from the posts on this thread on /.)..

I call BS on that link (Joel on Software) -- the author is not an expert on fonts and he flip flops on this topic in blog posts that are less than 24 hours apart.

I also call BS on Apple's so-called 'philosophy' of how fonts should look - that line is came from either their marketing department or their fan base.

The Reason the "preserve the font design" claim is BS:

• The claim is, that Apple is attempting to be true to the font's design
• Safari renders Georgia/Verdana/Tahoma (everything) with the same fuzziness compared to Window's crisp look
• As you can see here and here, Microsoft was responsible for the design of these fonts (they hired the designer to create them for the specific purpose of on-screen readability)
• So if Apple is trying to be true to the font's design, how come they don't render these fonts exactly the same way as Windows? Windows rendition should be the reference in this case.

The Reason "its supposed to be closer to what it looks like in print" is BS:

• When doing work that is intended for print, you would be using something like photoshop, or pagemaker or any one of the many graphics or desktop publishing softwares out there
• S/w intended for this purpose does it's own font rendering - it doesn't rely on the OS for this
• At all other times you are using s/w that is intended for the screen first and foremost, and print next (for example, I print less than 0.01% of the web pages I visit, practically never print anything that comprises the menus or other UI elements, print less than 0.001% of my email, docs, code, IM conversations, etc. etc.
• Even allowing for the Mac's heritage with desktop publishing and graphic design -- the average Mac user probably prints less than 20% (less than 1 in 5) of the things she views on the Mac's screen
• That being the case, the 80% use-case is blindingly obvious -- Apple knows exactly what to optimize for (or at least they should)

Yet, they do nothing to improve their font rendering and their fan base continues to defend their inexplicable choices (as seen from the posts on this thread on /.)..

Tahoma was made specifically for small-font-size menus and titles, not for large blocks of text (see here).

Keep the left and right sidebars in small-size Tahoma, but please please please change the article and comment text to Georgia.

Seriously, does everything Google does have to make the front page? That post contains zero new information that isn't here, here, or here.

Yes, fine, I admit it, everyone at Google is smarter, happier, richer, more statuesque, and throws better parties than The Rest of Us. We're not worthy. Now stop telling me about it.

"Install some decent fonts"

I like to bash MS as well, but Georgia and (especially) Verdana are lovely (read more here). Verdana-Regular-8 is a great non-antialiased font that I use for everything (including coding).

An aside - why do so many coders insist on using non-proportional fonts in their editor of choice (we've come a long way from text-mode displays)? Proportional fonts are more readable and take up less horizontal space on the screen. Try it!

Verdana's a very good font - for it's purpose. It was designed by Matthew Carter specifically for use on screen - the emphasis is on function, not form. Have a look at these articles that explain some of the rationale behind the design:

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/fonts/verd ana/default.htm

There's no 'panacea of fonts'. Any typographer knows that different typefaces are appropriate in different situations.

And worst of all, he uses Verdana, an ugly, unreadable font that is not as suitable as Arial, Helvetica and sans-serif for viewing text on computer screens.

I just thought I would point out that Verdana was actually one of the first font faces actually designed for the screen. You can read more here.