Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft has announced it will release Internet Explorer 9 onto the web March 14. Internet Explorer 9 will be a massive overhaul for IE and brings much needed standards support, speed boosts and hardware acceleration.

The first Platform Preview of IE9 arrived nearly a year ago and since then Microsoft has released several more previews and betas. Along the way, IE9 has gained support for more HTML5 features, CSS3 improvements and better hardware acceleration.

IE9 will be good news for web developers since it adds considerable support for HTML5 and CSS3. Its predecessor, IE8 doesn’t support any of HTML5 and is widely blamed for holding back efforts to create a better web.

Microsoft is hoping to change that with IE9 which not only supports much of HTML5 and CSS3, but includes hardware acceleration for faster performance and privacy protection settings to stop websites from tracking your movements around the web. IE9 is also no slouch when it comes to JavaScript performance thanks to the new Chakra JS engine.

We took a look at the HTML5 and CSS3 features in IE9 last year, but Microsoft has added quite a few more since then, including support for CSS3’s 2-D transforms and new selectors, HTML5’s semantic elements, the WOFF font format and the geolocation API.

In terms of web standards IE9 is light years beyond anything Microsoft has previously released. Granted, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are somewhat further along with the more experimental features of HTML5, but given IE’s dominant market share worldwide, IE9 should be a huge boon for HTML5 adoption (provided users upgrade).

We’ll be sure to give you a full rundown on everything that’s new in IE9 when it arrives next week.

See Also:

• New IE9 Offers Geolocation, Privacy Controls and More Speed
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS3 Support
• New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power
• Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support
• IE9 Leads Pack in HTML5 Support? Not Exactly

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Originally posted at Deep Tech

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One important reason for this feeling of added confusion was the wording in the logo’s FAQ, which stated that

The logo is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.

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Posted in HTML 5, Web Standards.

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Just a day after the W3C unveiled its new HTML5 logo, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has announced that it will drop the term “HTML5,” stop the versioning of HTML altogether and instead treat the evolving specification as a “living standard.”

While eliminating the version number from HTML has been part of the WHATWG’s plan from the beginning, the timing of the change is clearly related to the W3C’s attempt to embrace the term “HTML5.” The W3C recently showed off a new HTML5 logo, but the accompanying FAQ used the term HTML5 to cover everything from the actual spec to only tangentially related tools like CSS 3, WOFF and SVG. Many developers saw the W3C’s nebulous use of the term HTML5 as a sign that the term had become, like “AJAX,” just another marketing buzzword.

The W3C has since rewritten its FAQ to clarify and more sharply define just what HTML5 is and is not, but before that happened Ian Hickson, the WHATWG’s editor, announced that the WHATWG was renaming its spec to just HTML. Hickson says the WHATWG was “going to change the name last year but ended up deciding to wait a bit since people still used the term ‘HTML5′ a lot.”

Hickson then makes a not-so-subtle jab at the W3C, saying HTML5 “is now basically being used to mean anything Web-standards-related, so it’s time to move on!”

The W3C has long had a tenuous relationship with the WHATWG. Technically the W3C is the standards body charged with publishing the HTML spec. The WHATWG — a consortium of browser makers — grew out of the W3C’s neglect of HTML and its misguided decision to pursue XHTML 2. Now that both groups are working on the same spec, in theory, their goals are the same. In practice, however, the two groups often butt heads. In other words, just because the WHATWG has decided to abandon the term HTML5, don’t expect it to disappear overnight.

The W3C will continue to work toward “snapshots” that reflect stable milestones of the ever-changing WHATWG version of the spec. For now at least, that means the term HTML5 will be alive and well at the W3C, as the group works through its standard practice of issuing working drafts, holding last calls on changes and finally publishing the spec as a “recommendation.”

Since browser makers have long been well ahead of the W3C when it comes to implementing the latest and greatest parts of the HTML5 spec, they will likely focus on the WHATWG’s HTML spec, which will, like Google’s Chrome browser, follow a “rolling release” schedule.

No doubt the media and marketers will continue to use HTML5 as a buzzword that means far more than just the spec, but even that’s not always a bad thing. There’s no doubt that Apple, Google, the New York Times and everyone else who’s used HTML5 as an analog for the New Shiny has helped HTML5 — and all the other tools it’s come to stand for — gain momentum. As web developer Jeff Croft puts it, “sometimes we just need a word to rally behind.”

While not everyone understands the nuances of what’s HTML5, what’s CSS 3 and what’s just JavaScript, that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is excited about building a better web and that is exactly what HTML(5) is designed to do.

See Also:

• HTML5 Gains Logo, Loses Meaning
• Cool Sites: Nike’s ‘Better World’ Site Embraces HTML5
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?

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The W3C unveiled a new logo and branding strategy today. (You might have heard.) It brings all the deliciousness of a Soviet-era Transformers logo to the yummy conflation of several related technologies! Did you get your WOFF in my HTML, or did I get my CSS all over your HTML?

As per usual, a lot of people have said a lot of things about this. For my part, I figure, hey, given that CSS3 is now a branded part of your nutritious HTML5 breakfast, why not go with the flow? So I did. You’re welcome.

(Disclaimer: it’ll look best in recent WebKit, Gecko, or Opera browsers, but it’s at least comprehensible in them what doesn’t yet support CSS transforms. May not be valid in all jurisdictions. Not a flying toy.)

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The W3C’s new HTML5 logo

What’s that thing flailing awkwardly over the mouth of a mechanical shark? Why that’s HTML5 in its dashing new logo. Yes, the W3C, the standards body that oversees the development of the HTML5 spec, has blessed HTML5 with a snazzy new logo.

Naturally there are badges you can add to your site and t-shirts and stickers are already on sale (a portion of the proceeds go to the development of the W3C’s HTML5 Test Suite). The only thing left to do is figure out what “HTML5″ actually means, and that’s where the W3C has has thrown “HTML5″ over the shark.

HTML5 already enjoys more buzz that a web developer left alone in the back of a Mountain Dew truck (it even has it’s own posse), the only problem is that the buzz makers conflate just about every emerging web technology under the HTML5 umbrella. Purists have long decried headlines proclaiming the glory of HTML5 above an article about JavaScript and CSS 3, but now the one group that ought to know best appears to throwing in the towel and embracing the HTML5 hype.

While the new HTML5 logo looks good, the FAQ that accompanies it is troubling. According to the W3C, the logo is “a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.”

It doesn’t really matter if the New York Times thinks CSS 3 or SVG are HTML5, but we’d like to think that at least the organization in charge of describing what is, and is not, HTML5 would make some effort to distinguish between tools. Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.”

As web developer Jeremy Keith quips, “the term HTML5 has, with the support of the W3C, been pushed into the linguistic sewer of buzzwordland.” We had high hopes that Bruce Lawson’s acronym NEWT — New Exciting Web Technologies — would catch on and save HTML5 from buzzwordland, but alas, that appears unlikely.

With the blessing of those who oversee it, HTML5 now apparently means just about anything new and cool on the web. The new HTML5 logo is pretty sharp and the t-shirts look nice, but if we can’t have precise terms and linguistic clarity could we at least get a unitard with belt and cape?

See Also:

• Where on the Web Is HTML5?
• Cool Sites: Nike’s ‘Better World’ Site Embraces HTML5
• Play Asteroids in HTML5
• Flashy HTML5 Experiments Point to Web’s Future

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Ricardo Saavedra

I helped companies clarify their brand’s strategy, then create message to be spread through user-friendly websites, memorable online campaigns and effective social media marketing strategies.

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In the same way that the 00 visual identity symbolises the duality of collaboration and the act of binding collaborators, ideas, processes and philosophies together, The Collective V are very proud to bring you 00 Volume 01, Black Material Robert Knoke with 3 Deep.

Lost World’s Fairs

Internet Explorer 9 now supports WOFF, and the Friends of Mighty have joined forces to explore typographic possibilities on the web.

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• Really excited to catch up with @bokardo at Warm Gun, but even more excited to share his recent post Creating Engaged & Passionate Users (Part 1)
• If you’ve ever been beaten by a single pixel that threw your entire layout off, you’ll appreciate this very useful post, The Ins & Outs of CSS Resets (via Script Junkie)
• Liz Danzico @bobulate does something pretty cool with her blog, which now changes color signaling evening hours.
• Nicest guy on the internet, co-author of 52 Weeks of UX, & recently joined Twitter’s design team, Josh Brewer @jbrewer, finds time to relaunch himself with a truly terrific illustration
• Wow! Look What You Can Do With WOFF Typography (read the comments too!)

Wildcard: Zendesk’s Jake Holman (@jakeisonline) writes on Zengage, “TechCrunch Disrupt Investigation: What Happened to Customer Support”

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

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A website showcasing IE9 and its support for WOFF, accomplished by showcasing three designs by Naz Hamid, Frank Chimero, and Jason Santa Maria. Each design is just about as fantastic as web design gets.

For related reading, see write-ups by Naz Hamid, Frank Chimero, Jason Santa Maria, and Trent Walton (front end development).

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The nascent Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is getting a boost this week thanks to some new initiatives being kicked off by the W3C, the web’s governing body.

The W3C recently created a working group to build a WOFF into a web standard, and that group will be holding its first face-to-face meeting at the TypeCon 2010 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles.

Representatives from the major browser vendors, several font foundries and web services providers will be in attendance. Also, a dozen or so select individuals will be participating in a series of presentations and panel discussions about WOFF throughout the conference. All the design industry folks in attendance will get a peek at the future of high-quality typography on the web. There are scores of topics on the program, but this year, WOFF is getting top billing.

Things are looking up for web fonts in general. Monday, Webkit announced a partnership with Adobe to include the company’s fonts as part of its licensing service. Last month, Google launched a new tool (tied to its Font API) that makes it dead easy to include any of its open source fonts in website designs.

The Web Fonts working group was formed earlier this year at the W3C, and the group has already released the first working draft of the specification that will eventually lead to WOFF becoming a recommended web standard.

WOFF works just like OpenType and TrueType — you use the @font-face CSS property to drop the fonts in — but the font data is compressed, so the files download faster, and you can include more fonts in your designs without worrying as much about payload bloat.

The W3C adds this bit: “The WOFF format is not expected to replace other formats such as TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts, but provides an alternative solution for use cases where these formats may be less performant, or where licensing considerations make their use less acceptable.”

Support for WOFF is already strong — Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft browsers either ship with or are building support, and the fast-moving foundries are releasing WOFF fonts — so why is the W3C’s involvement a big deal when the open source format is enjoying such success?

Standardization by the W3C is the best path to true interoperability. It will keep all the parties on the same page when it comes to things like accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, internationalization and search engine indexing. How much metadata to include and how it is handled are also big issues. Plus, fonts have taken an astonishingly long time to arrive on the web because of red tape around licensing, and a collaborative process for developing licensing infrastructures will go a long way toward convincing some of the more conservative type designers to make web-friendly versions of their creations.

The standard will take years to complete (the process is very slow — we’re guessing 2012 or so), and until then, we’ll see designers, developers and innovative service providers like Typekit and Google continue to feed the interest in fancy web fonts. Those not on the bleeding edge may be stuck in the boring world of “web safe” fonts for a while, but at least the future is bright.

TypeCon 2010 runs from August 17 through 20.

Photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
• Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

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St Marie is a lovely typeface by Stereotypes, available under the terms of a Creative Commons License. The download package includes the .otf file for offline designing, as well as the .eot, .svg, and .woff formats for font embedding (demo).

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The WOFF was conceived by Mozilla as an easier way for web designers to include fonts in their designs. The idea is to let web authors include WOFF fonts in their page designs by linking to the font files in their code the same way they link to images and other downloadable files.

WOFF attempts to address some of the problems with CSS 3’s @font-face rule, which allows for downloadable fonts, but says nothing about the format of the fonts. As we’ve noted before, using @font-face can lead to radically different results in different browsers. Last year popular website Boing Boing launched a redesign using CSS3’s @font-face rule, but ran into problems when things didn’t render correctly on older machines.

Another concern is page load times. Because WOFF has built-in compression, adding extra WOFF fonts to your pages shouldn’t slow them down as much as a traditional OpenType or TrueType font file.

Since WOFF support was added to Firefox (in version 3.6), Opera and Microsoft have both pledged their support and the format has been submitted to the W3C for consideration as a standard.

The IE9 beta doesn’t yet support WOFF, but Microsoft is an official sponsor of the W3C proposal and the IEBlog has written about WOFF so we hope to see WOFF support before IE9 is finished.

With Google Chrome onboard, Apple’s Safari may soon be the only currently shipping browser without WOFF support.

Perhaps even more important than browser support is the fact that font foundries are getting behind the new spec. WOFF fonts aren’t secure, so the format won’t be used by foundries wanting to regulate the use of their work. However, over 30 major type foundries — including Adobe, House Industries, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and ITC, LinoType — are already endorsing the format.

While WOFF doesn’t solve all the problems of web fonts, it’s a huge step in the right direction. With Firefox, Opera, IE and now Chrome all supporting WOFF, designers may soon be able to add just about any font to any webpage.

If you’d like to know more about WOFF, plus see examples of its use, head over to the original announcement on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

See Also:

• Mozilla Throws Its Weight Behind Improving Web Type, Adopts WOFF for Firefox
• Boing Boing’s Redesign Uncovers the Dark Side of Web Fonts
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Typekit Hopes to Become the YouTube of Fonts

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Real fonts on the web: House Industries supports WOFF format.

…a font format for the Web that satisfies the needs and concerns of browser makers, web designers, and type foundries. …WOFF, offers compression to speed page load times, freedom from thorny legacy issues and inclusiveness (font outlines can be Postscript or TrueType).

WOFF has the support of a wide spectrum of the type community; from peers such as Emigre, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Commercial Type, etc and larger foundries such as Linotype and Monotype. Today it has also gained the support of Mozilla in the their release of Firefox 3.6 (Mozilla has a full list of designers and foundries that support WOFF on that page). We hope and expect that WOFF will quickly gain support in other major browsers as we support, endorse and expect to license our library for use on the Web in the WOFF format in the future.

Read more

• The Problem: We have the fonts, we have the CSS and the workaround for IE. What we don’t have is beautiful, reliable, consistent cross-platform rendering of real fonts like Gotham, Franklin, Garamond, etc. — 29 October 2009
• Web Fonts and Standards: How real fonts work on the web via standard CSS. Making it work in IE. The licensing hurdle. Rise of the middlemen and their effect on the adoption of font embedding standards. — 17 August
• Web Fonts Now, for Real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau publishes a proposal for a permissions table enabling real fonts to be used on the web without binding or other DRM. — 16 July 2009
• Web Fonts Now (How We’re Doing With That): Commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding; browser support; Cufón and SIFR, oh, my; Adobe, web fonts, and EOT; Typekit debuts; — 23 May 2009

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Mozilla announced Tuesday that version 3.6 of Firefox, due by the end of the year, will support the new Web Open Font Format, or WOFF. Web authors will be able to include WOFF fonts in their page designs by linking to the font files in their code the same way they link to images and other downloadable files.

WOFF becomes the third downloadable font format supported by Firefox — version 3.5 included support for TrueType and OpenType font downloads.

But WOFF has two key advantages over TrueType and OpenType: WOFF fonts are compressed, so they download faster, and they include support for tags and other unencrypted metadata.

This is a significant step forward not only for the emerging open format, but also for type on the web in general, which is still stuck in a state of mild turmoil.

For years, designers have been limited to using only a set of five or six common fonts on the web. But thanks to new font rendering tools within the emerging HTML5 and CSS3 standards, web designers now have the ability to use newer, more visually interesting typefaces — and make that type appear more consistently across browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions.

Even with these new abilities, intervening forces like DRM, licensing restrictions and varying levels of support from the browser makers have stalled progress, forcing the modern designer to resort to a variety of workarounds and hacks if they want to use these new fonts. Some possible solutions have shown up, including the OpenType standard and a “middleman” licensing model proposed by the start-up Typekit, but haven’t yet gained traction. Earlier this month, popular website Boing Boing launched a redesign using CSS3’s @font-face rule, but ran into problems when things didn’t render correctly on older machines.

WOFF doesn’t promise to totally solve the problem of browser compatibility — it still uses the same paradigm within CSS3’s @font-face rule where users are served a preferred font choice first, but are then offered backup choices if their browser doesn’t support the first one. And there are still special considerations for IE 8 users, as Microsoft’s browser supports @font-face, but only if you use the .eot font format.

What it does do is improve workflows for those using downloadable fonts in their designs.

Mozilla contributor John Dagget outlines the compression and tagging advantages on the Mozilla Hacks blog:

First, compression is part of the WOFF format so web authors can optimize the size of fonts used on their pages. The compression format is lossless, the uncompressed font data will match that of the original OpenType or TrueType font, so the way the font renders will be the same as the original. Similar compression can be achieved using general HTTP compression but because compression is part of the WOFF format, it’s simpler for authors to use, especially in situations where access to server configuration is not possible.

Second, the format includes optional metadata so that a font vendor can tag their fonts with information related to font usage. This metadata doesn’t affect how fonts are loaded but tools can use this information to identify the source of a given font, so that those interested in the design of a given page can track down the fonts used on that page.

Dagget also notes that WOFF fonts aren’t “secure,” so the format shouldn’t be used by foundries wanting to regulate the use of their work. However, over 30 major type foundries — including House Industries, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and ITC — are already endorsing the format, and Mozilla’s support should help foster its popularity.

You can read more about how WOFF is used, plus see examples on the Mozilla Hacks blog. You can also check out WOFF support yourself by downloading the latest nightly builds of Firefox and giving it a whirl.

See Also:

• Boing Boing’s Redesign Uncovers the Dark Side of Web Fonts
• Typekit Hopes to Become the YouTube of Fonts
• Use @font-face Today With Free, Legal Fonts

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