much lower quality in screen display without subpixel rendering. Time will
solve this problem, when users replace their equipment with new hardware
and current operating systems. Furthermore, Internet Explorer 9 will work
with the text engine DirectWrite that provides a significantly improved
rendering.
Using web fonts for your design entails thorough testing on as many
different browsers and platforms as possible with a close look at the
various options of rendering text. If the screen display is of poor quality
without subpixel rendering you might want to opt for graceful degradation
and deliver system fonts for users of older browsers and systems. The
easiest way to exclude older browsers or operating systems from style
sheets with embedded web fonts is the use of conditional comments. Of
course, using JavaScript is the more elegant way to detect whether or not
the client՚s subpixel rendering is turned on or off.
Text Layout
Even though some web layouts are drawing nearer to print layouts thanks
to rich typography and web font embedding there՚s still a big difference: To
this day browsers do not offer automatic hyphenation. Especially for
languages with very long words, e.g. German, it is not possible to use left
and right justified text without creating spacious gaps thus reducing the
readability of body text.
By means of JavaScript you can provide for a language-based client-side
hyphenation. A server-side solution is offered by phpHyphenator.
Nevertheless, these are still emergency solutions for a missing function that
should be an integral part of any browser which it will hopefully be in the
future.