Typography for the World Wide Web

Going down to Brighton for whatever reason always seems to be fun, whether it’s for a conference like d.construct, or a day out on the beach. There’s something special about walking down the hill from the station towards the sea.

I’ll be attending dconstruct on Friday down in Brighton. It’s my 4th year running, and it’s one of the conferences on the circuit that I generally don’t want to miss. Since the inaugural event back in 2005 when just 70 or so people got together in Fabrica (to talk about the latest buzz, “Web 2.0”), there’s been a very special vibe around the occasion, which hasn’t slipped despite the growth in size.

Some updates seeing as I haven't posted for a little while.

Just a quick note to point any mapping geeks out there to the inclusion of Ordnance Survey maps in Multimap's free mapping API. These are the 1:50000 Landranger maps so popular amongst walkers, hikers and anyone who took Geography lessons at school.

When we’re hiring JavaScript developers at Multimap we sometimes ask them to build a little application, or mash-up, with the Multimap API. It’s a pretty simple little task but it allows us to see how people approach building a web application.

This is a list of five things I often notice when looking at these little applications that could be improved.

Most of the articles and examples I’ve seen of handling events with event delegation use some kind of JavaScript library. Chris Heilmann’s much cited article uses the YUI library, and Dan Webb’s presentation at @media last month used the Prototype framework.

For those of us just building a bog standard JavaScript application without one of these fancy libraries, it’s worth taking a look at how event delegation works in the real world. It sounds more complicated than handling events in the standard way, but it really isn’t.

A few people at Hackday presented hacks that use Twitter’s direct messaging API to interface with a third party Web Service. By far the coolest one was Colm and Richard’s that allows you to request data from eBay and Wikipedia as well as a host of useful information such as nearest cashpoints, cinemas, tubes, restaurants and many others.

It’s been a couple of days since hackday now, and I want to record my version of it. In summary it was the most fantastic weekend I could ever have hoped for. I had a feeling I would enjoy it, but it exceeded every expectation in every way.

And it was bloody hard work.

Coming up to five O'Clock in the morning at Alexandra Palace. I'm still going stong to be honest, but I know I'm going to be frazzled in about 12 hours time.

There's still a fair few fellow hackers up and working, but plenty of others scattered around the floor and the walls of the West Hall. Most trying to leverage two odd shaped bean-bags into various sleeping tools.

I'll be up at Alexandra Palace tomorrow at the BBC/Yahoo! Hackday. I'm excited about it even thought I haven't really got any plans or ideas for things to work on. The atmosphere at this amazing venue should be pretty special, and I can't wait to see some of the cool stuff that is going to be created over the weekend.

At the risk of going overboard with posts about maps, there’s a couple of other things that came out of Multimap this week that I want to mention.

Yesterday saw the release of the Multimap Open API, a JavaScript interface to much of Multimap’s core mapping functionality, and the power behind mapping on sites such as Yell.com.

One of my favourite features of the new Multimap website is the different varieties of map data you can pull into the map viewer. Rather than just one layer of rendered vector data seen on many web-based maps, Multimap allows you to select from various other data sets depending on your location.

I’ve been contributing to the W3C HTML Working Group working on the next version of HTML. I say contributing, I’ve found it tough enough keeping up with the pure volume of mail the group generates to make much of a contribution so far. Also, a lot of the initial discussions have been around some pretty high-level design principles which I’m leaving to the proper experts for the moment.

There’s been a bit of chat recently around things like Flash vs. Ajax, the The Ajax/Flash continuum, and other such pulse raising topics. I’d been thinking a little bit about the same sort of stuff myself, and indeed I weighed in at Jeremy’s blog in a rather non-committal fashion (if that’s possible), throwing the best-tool-for-the-job line out a few times.

Of course I’m significantly hampered when trying to make a point in this argument by the fact that I have got pretty much bugger-all experience when it comes to Flash. So last weekend I decided to address that problem a little bit.

Remote Script Logging (RSLog) is a light-weight and easily customisable script which allows you to catch and trace JavaScript errors occuring on your users’ machines by logging them back to your web server.

It is completely unobtrusive, adds just one reference to the browsers global namespace, and weighs in at just 660 bytes when minified.

Everyone’s talking about OpenID right now. Whether it’s going to develop into the solution for single sign-in across the web remains to be seen. But it’s certainly getting its chance, with adoption by a lot of significant companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL… and now, UsableType.

I started writing on UsableType In November 2004, and in the 28 months since then I have written here exactly 4 times. 1.7 posts a year—not that great.

This fifth post is accompanied by a new design by Denis Radenkovic and an entirely new server-side architecture, both of which I am pretty excited about.

If you're relatively new to microformats, then this article was written with you in mind. You don't need to have any prior knowldege to understand what's going on here; in fact, it's probably best if you don't. I'm not going to explain microformats—I wouldn't know where to start. What I want to show you is an example of microformats that you can use in your markup today, and that has a real world use today. As with all web technologies, the best way to learn is by example.

Before embarking on an analysis of sIFR, let’s make sure everyone is up to speed on what it is and how it works. sIFR stands for scalable Inman Flash Replacement and is a technique for delivering truly customised typography on the web. It does this by replacing any text in a designated element with Flash rendered text as the page is loading. It is important to understand that it is not the element that is being replaced by Flash, but the text within it, leaving the element to be styled or positioned as normal.

Times New Roman is one of the most widely used typefaces in the world, as well as one of the most recognisable. The standard default font in nearly all browsers in living memory is Times, and for years when reading content on the web it was the typeface we were stuck with.

However, with the birth of CSS, web typography was given a new lease of life, and everyone's first move was to dump Times New Roman along with the long-lost marquee and blink elements.

How could we publish the first edition of a site like UsableType without an article on font sizing? It would be like toast without butter, fish without chips, a Bush without war.

So here it is: another article on font sizing.