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The plague of web fonts

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An example of why I think web fonts are not ready for prime time. Nothing against the IA Summit folks: I could have chosen any one of a million sites using web fonts, but I happened across this one this morning, and had to share. (Click on the image for the full-resolution version.)

The image on the left is the page rendered in Chrome/Win7. The quality of the text rendering is horrible. The heavy aliasing smudges the characters and fills in the negative space, most noticably in the menu bar. The quote text in the middle of the page looks like it was set in some serif version of a Ransom font.

The image on the right is the same page rendered in Safari/iOS. Better, and while there is still to my eye too much aliasing on the type, the text is easier to read than with the Chrome/Win7 version. At least the page doesn’t look broken.

I think I need to spend more time trying to see if there are ways to do web fonts properly. I know that the team here at McGill responsible for our web management system made a special effort to improve the quality of the web fonts used, and the improvement was noticeable (although I’m still not entirely satisfied). Is the problem inherent with web fonts, with the way browsers render web fonts, or with the way they are implemented?

My guess is that the problem is that web fonts look best on Mac OS / iOS, that most web designers are using Macs, and are not bothering to ensure that the technology works on other platforms. This is one of the greatest sins a web designer can make, and reeks of the browser-specific designs of the 1990’s.

As an admirer of fine typography, I want web fonts to work, but it is clear that we are a long way off. I would encourage designers to think carefully before using web fonts in their projects, if only to preserve the readability and overall aesthetic appeal of the Web.

The Web is more than its structure

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BBC: The decaying web and our disappearing history

This is just one investigation, and a preliminary one at that. The figures, though, suggest a clear linear trend: the loss of just over 10% of the resources shared via social media each year, even when archiving is taken into account, or around 0.02% of this content lost every day.

Stories along these lines seem to surface at least once a year and seem to me to almost be accepted as truth. Curious, I decided to follow through to the original paper (you can tell I have a lot of things I should be doing when I start to check sources).

The news item is accurate in that the research is studying the decay of the web, or more accurately, the URI/URLs used to identify and link to pieces of information on the web.

However, just because URL may no longer be valid does not mean that the information no longer exists. It may simply have moved to another URL. Is this bad practice as far as web architecture goes? Yes. It is maintaining URL persistence always the highest priority for web development projects. No.

(I am certainly guilty personally and professionally of not making URL persistence a high priority for many of my web projects and sites. Something for me to work on.)

While URL persistence is a desirable goal, it isn’t necessary for the web to exist or for us to use it effectively. Web authors are constantly updating their links, and our search tools are constantly updating their indexes, and for the most part if the information still exists, we’re able to find it regardless of whether its URL has changed.

Now there is information that is disappearing from the web, some of it in huge chunks as hosting services shut down and web sites go offline. That IMHO is a far more important issue than link rot. It would be interesting to see some studies that look into that phenomenon. Thankfully we have the Internet Archive (currently offline as I write this!) and groups like the Archive Team who are working to preserve that information.

To say that the web is decaying it true, but it doesn’t provide a full or accurate picture of what is happening. There is as much if not more growth than decay. The content and structures of the web are being added to and modified continually. That the web is usable at all suggests that it is for the most part stable. Given the choice, I think we should focus our efforts on creating, improving, and preserving content, and issues with the structure will work themselves out.