Apple have released Safari 3.1 for Windows and OS X (and Linux using Wine) today, and the feature that really stood out for me was the introduction of web fonts. Website makers have been bound to the same core fonts for years now, so suddenly having a huge palette to choose from is going to make an enormous difference!
Using them is pretty easy. First you have to declare the fonts using the @font-face rule – and, importantly, you have to declare each variant (weight, style, etc) individually by linking to the font file involved. You can’t just link to the directory and let the browser work out the variants. To see what I mean, take a look at this example (using Safari 3.1, of course!) and view the source to see the CSS involved.
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There’s an interesting post on warpspire.com at the moment, decrying the speed of implementation for HTML 5 and CSS 3 and suggesting Flash/AIR as a better alternative. I completely disagree with it, but it’s interesting nonetheless. HTML 5 in particular comes in for heavy criticism as it’s perceived that its adoption will take too long.
But, as the title of this post makes clear: you can start using HTML 5 right now!
Well, you can’t really – but with Opera and Safari, you can at least pretend to while you get used to the syntax.
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Firefox has experimental support. Opera has experimental support. And now, Webkit has experimental support. The new HTML5 <video> element is getting support from a large part of the browser market.
According to the spec, User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format
; Firefox and Opera do so natively, while Webkit does so with a plugin for Quicktime (see Xiph.org).
According to my site stats – which are very far from being representative – roughly 60% of my visitors use one of the three browsers mentioned above; that’s a pretty big potential market. And remember, what the geeks use now, everybody will use in a year or two.