By Marko Dugonjić CHAPTER 9browsers
Different browsers use different defaults to handle typography. I know,
tell me something new. However, the situation is not as horrible as it used
to be back in the early 2000s, because browser vendors now listen to —
and collaborate with — designers and developers. Even the once closed IE
development team released a couple of nifty typography demos that can be
found at Use The Whole Font^30.
As important as it is to stay in the loop with the latest updates, it’s also
essential to participate with feature requests, bug reports, case studies and
compatibility tests. Many conferences and meet-ups for Web developers
are sponsored by browser vendors and they usually send a technical evan-
gelist to present the latest developments. Talk to them during the breaks,
via email or social networks. Even if they may not have the answer to your
particular question, they will certainly forward you on to someone within
their organization who will. The best conversation starter with a technical
evangelist is to have a ready-made test page with both live examples and
screenshots. Easy!
The main differences in typographic defaults across browsers are in
supported font formats, font loading behavior and legibility options. A dis-
cussion about font formats would well exceed an already intensive chapter
(I did warn you I was enthusiastic about the topic), but I’ll explain how to
manage differences with loading behavior a little later. Let’s just focus on
legibility and rendering for a moment.
text-rendering Property
If you haven’t been sleeping under a rock for the past few years, you are
then probably familiar with the text-rendering CSS property^31 that can
be set to enable kerning and ligatures. While Internet Explorer and Opera
don’t support text-rendering at the time of writing, it is applied by default
30 http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/opentype/
31 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-rendering