Yesterday I experienced an unusual rendering issue in Internet Explorer. The entire layout was aligning left and a couple z-index declarations were being ignored. Usually you can fix the minor issues with some Conditional Comments but these inconsistencies were too great to blame on the Trident Layout Engine(MSHTML). Besides, before I added Coldfusion to the mix it rendered properly in every browser.
Many times a “table like” layout is necessary to abide by the Rule of Thirds law, specially with the currently popular “magazine” type website layouts.
Adding a table to the layout would simply be too easy, and wouldn’t fit into the “Do Everything without Tables” mentality plaguing the web. So I demonstrate how to achieve the behavior without the table.
Years ago before I discovered Internet Explorer’s Conditional Comments, I struggled with CSS hacks, IE filters, and unreliable JavaScript sniffers.
With this technique markup inside the comments will be only visible to the IE browser in general or specific versions that you specify.
There’s no surprise that the fonts web developers are always required to resort to are depressingly limited.
The sure bets are Arial and Times New Roman. Everything else is a gamble on some level even with Vista introducing some new installed fonts.
You can always use a graphic, a graphics server or flash with embedded fonts to get the same effect you had in Photoshop, but let’s face it, one reason for a website is so you can be found.
Although image alt and/or title tags, and even flash content are now search engine friendly you still want the ease and accessibility of plain text. This makes web accessibility for people using screen readers because of a disability all the easier to implement. Don’t forget all the different platforms the web is viewed through these days. The last of the Mobile Browsers, Safari, Safari on the iPhone, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Opera on the Wii, Whatever the Playstation3 is using, and whatever you guys run on Linux. Plain text as of now is just easier to adapt to the different environments.
The video below is an extensive look at fonts for the web from creative techniques to Arials origin.
