Checking for installed fonts with @font-face and local()

Firefox 3.5 was released earlier today, and joins Safari in supporting the @font-face rule with OpenType and TrueType font families, allowing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are correctly licensed, of course).

One slight drawback of the technique is the blank space that’s displayed as the new font is loaded into the browser; this is especially unnecessary for users who already have that font natively on their system.

The way to get around that is quite simple; use local() to check if the font is on the user’s system first.

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With (standards-compliant) browser innovation firmly back on the agenda, there’s a lot of exciting new technology to get to grips with. This week, Google have thrown their weight firmly behind HTML5, while a new start-up aims to bring web fonts to all.

I’m at home with the flu at the moment, so taking the opportunity to un-star some items in Google Reader; this post is a link-dump with a little added comment.

A few of them have been in my favourites for a couple of months, so apologies if you’ve seen them already.

WAI-ARIA is a relatively new standard from the W3C, which provides semantic information to assisted screen reading technology. It’s fairly rapidly being adopted by browser makers and should become a part of your mark-up toolkit.

The recent release of the Safari 4 Beta saw a new standards proposal from the Webkit team, for controlling animation using CSS. While there’s still a debate to be had about whether CSS is the right language for this (I still fall on the side that it doesn’t, strictly), I do think their implementation is well handled. I wanted to try it out, so I went back to the earliest form of digital entertainment: Pong!

To great fanfare, The Queen, in the company of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, unveiled the new British Monarchy website today. Unfortunately, what they unveiled was a real dog’s dinner.

I’ve become one of the ranked masses of iPhone users, and now that I’ve come to terms with its limitations I’m generally pretty happy with it. One thing that strikes me as pretty strange, however, is the lack of support for the common data formats iCalendar and vCard - and, as a result of that, the non-existent support of the hCalendar and hCard microformats - in Safari.