web designer + front-end developer
So apparently the new Google Fonts project does not include the SVG font format. What does that mean?
The beautiful custom web fonts won’t work on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/faq.html#Browsers_Supported
All that means is that users on those devices willl see you fallback fonts instead.
This saddens me, as I’ve lately been doing more and more of my casual surfing on an iPad. I think that the web is about to become a much more visually interresting place, and I’ll be missing out on it.
So the question is: who blinks first? Apple and Google are becoming cutthroat competitors, so I’m not sure if there will ever be a happy solution for users.
Ultimately, I’d like to see Apple add the support to their mobile Safari browsers than the other way around. I think that is better for the development community at large, and will benefit the users the most in the long term.
That didn’t take long.
http://drupal.org/project/google_fonts
It is encouraging to see the new Google Fonts offering being embraced by the web design community, and also by the larger open source community.
What’s remarkable has been the almost universal praise this project has received.
What I’m most excited to see is how the library of fonts expands. I’m still unclear on how it’s curated, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that there could two or three times the amount of fonts in a year’s time.
Do yourself a favor, and check this out.
Now that a real company is standing behind web fonts, I think web typography is going to explode.
The server response is unreal – I’ve not been seeing any flashes of un-styled content in any of my own test uses of it. Like in my headlines or current site title.
I also encourage others to start using these fonts that Google is hosting. The more they’re used across the web, the more users will have cached versions of them – which means faster response for everyone.
I do have one question: how does one contribute to this apparently open-source effort? That is, can one contribute fonts to this directory? I’m sure the folks at The League of Movable Type would love to have some of their work represented.