Acid 3 - The Web Browsers Test

By Avi
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megamanXplosion

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As of now, only 10 web-safe fonts are available, which are generally included with popular operating systems. Embeddable fonts were tried in the Netscape days but there weren't many tools available for the chosen font formats so the technology wasn't used much. The fonts you could legally embed were crap and those that were worth embedding couldn't be legally embedded. Many typographers were, and are, displeased with the way the specification works because they don't want their fonts to be so easily pirated. Typographers and browser vendors need to meet and find a viable solution.

The open source community haven't limited themselves to software though. Many fonts are being created under the Open Font License that people may distribute freely, even with commercial products. With some encouragement, various operating system vendors could include many of those fonts with their operating systems. That would allow more than 10 web-safe fonts. This wouldn't be a permanent solution because operating system vendors cannot include thousands of fonts with their operating systems, but it would please web designers while waiting for the browser vendors and typographers to meet and find a viable solution to the problem of embeddable fonts.

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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Why not? If the web browser renders the font, why wouldn't it be the same? If the font isn't included in the browser, it could be downloaded like an image for a web page. There is no reason why fonts can't be universal across all browsers in the future.

Web browsers don't really render fonts, they use the system facilities to render fonts (Firefox uses Uniscribe on windows, Pango on Linux and ATSUI on OS X). In some cases with some font API's, the browser will need to render it though (If the font API doesn't provide a way of constructing a font in memory from path data, browsers will need to render SVG fonts themselves)

Sounds good. (Y) Hopefully other browsers follow suit.

IE already supports the css font-face rules, although MS went with their own format (It only embeds the characters the page is using, making it smaller to download, and also making it harder to use if you're not the guy making the site)

A much better option (IMO) is just making the browser read the embedding bit before displaying it (People who want to embed it are going to do so anyway, regardless of what copyright protection stuff you throw in)

Edit: Opera supports SVG fonts as well, This is the second time I've forgotten Opera supports them >.<

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Avi

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Yesterdays Nightly Build of Webkit scored 87, todays scores 90! With Safari 3.1 final not too far away (for those that don't know Safari is based on Webkit) it's very likely it will be one of the first to pass the Acid 3 test.

90? Holly crap!

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SnowRanger13

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90? Holly crap!

Thats what I said. I went and checked and turns out I have access to Safari 3.1 Beta so I wanted to see how it did compared to Safari 3.0.4 and Webkit.

Safari 3.0.4 - 39/100

Safari 3.1 Beta (build 5525.12) - 75/100

Webkit March 4th - 87/100

Webkit March 5th - 90/100

Very likely that in the next few days/weeks we will see Webkit reach 100/100 and since Safari is based on Webkit chances are that the final release of Safari 3.1 will also get 100/100.

Safari 3.1 will be the best choice on OS X, while Safari 3.1 will get the same Acid score on Windows as it does on OSX, Opera or Firefox will still be better choice for Windows users.

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