Andreas Demmer

In various blog comments, my visitors kept complaining about the Flash headlines. This has come to an end right now!

When I relaunched the page for the last time, I have choosen the DIN font for the header, navigation and headlines. Because of DIN being a commercial font, the only valid way to use it was by embedding it as Flash font with the help of sIFR. This technology only had few drawbacks because it had full fallbacks for browsers without Flash and the headlines were selectable, too. Of course, a native solution would have been better. And this is, what I did yesterday!

With the growing market share of newer browsers that support font embedding via @font-face, the days of flash-headlines were counted. Unfortunally, this made DIN a no go, because its license forbids sharing it for download (which is what embedding it with @font-face actually does). With the Qlassik (and accordingly the Capsuula for narrow text), I found two beautiful free fonts for all headlines.

Nice side effect: @font-face allows custom fonts for longer texts. This was impossible with sIFR as Flash would literally take forever to render all texts on the website. Not even speaking of the memory consumption for the dozens of Flash instances on the website. And so I make use of Molengo as another free font for all running texts, at the same time cutting all long font-family replacement lists that were needed to treat all major operating systems equal.

Unfortunally, some older browsers are now forced to fallback fonts. But IMHO this is a small price to pay for providing an optimized surfing experience for all modern browsers. Even Konqueror, the default browser for my preferred desktop environment KDE, renders the site beautifully without any additional addons needed. And as it comes to happen, my website is not a customer project, empowering me to make the final decision. This was an easy one to make: My audience mostly uses modern browser. A fact that was proven by the open source analytics tool Piwik.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2010 and is filed under KDE, Linux, Webdesign, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.

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