I think this is just totally cool – WEB FONTS! Google has recently released web fonts: http://code.google.com/webfonts. For years we have been stuck with a limited set of fonts that could be displayed in web pages – Arial, Times New Roman, Courier, Georgia, Verdana, and Geneva. To do anything more interesting I’ve always had to embed them in images – such as for menus.
I saw a Twitter post about these web fonts and got pretty excited – the concept of having more options natively in a web page – not having to use a graphic or flash to accomplish this. There are some interesting fonts available – I used “IM Fell Double Pica SC” in my blog for the titles – which I think is just cool. It took me a little while to figure it out – but I found this article that shows how to use them in a WordPress blog: http://wpmu.org/how-to-use-the-google-font-directory-with-wordpress-and-buddypress/
This is another one of those items that tell me that web content is really about to blossom – in looking at the documentation (http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/getting_started.html) there are some interesting things you can do with these – such as adding shadows.
Sports Illustrated demonstrated an HTML5 demo of what, to me, is what a magazine on the web should be:http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/19/si.html5.demo.shows.flash.not.needed.to.demo/ Make sure you watch the video – as it’s fascinating what they can do without flash or other special apps. From what I’ve heard the native apps on the iPad just don’t touch this – and this would work on any tablet or PC. You can tell Google influenced this app – as their vision of the world is more open and based on the browser – so HTML5 takes us much closer to that reality.
