Type Readability on the Web

[ggreig]

There are a couple of interesting videos on Channel 9. They're the latest interview with Bill Hill, one of the most interesting guys to listen to at Microsoft.

Hill's originally from a publishing and typography background rather than software development, so for a start it's a nice change of perspective. He's a very enthusiastic speaker, and as it happens he's also Scottish - he worked on The Scotsman in the days when it was still a credible newspaper.

What he's talking about is trying to improve typography and page layout on the web in order to improve online readability.

He's not a web expert per se - he's picking up standards-compliant HTML and CSS as he goes along - and if you're a web developer, you may have qualms about some aspects of what he's trying to do. For example, his preference for full-screen viewing goes counter to received wisdom about how web content should be designed, and it's fairly easy to find situations in which his sample pages don't work.

However, you should bear in mind that this is work in progress, and that while he's challenging some web assumptions, he really does know his stuff on readability, so it's worth hearing what he has to say. Look past the bits that immediately give you the grue!

The real substance is that Microsoft are opening up their previously proprietary font-embedding technology for the web, and making it clear they won't support the alternative font-linking solution - for reasons that are perfectly good if you believe that type designers deserve to earn a living. Ascender Corporation are explicitly throwing their weight behind this, and it's likely to be supported by others. Hopefully it will also be possible for the other browsers to implement support for font-embedding now that it's no longer proprietary.

tobyaw will be glad to know he may have been ahead of the curve with the embedded-font typography on the Brighthelm web site.

Comments

[tobyaw]

His website looks a little unhappy in Safari.

I can think of a lot of problems with multi-column designs for online viewing, especially if one bumps up the text size. Too few words per line; too much scrolling up and down.

[tobyaw]

…and I hate to say it, but having tried font embedding all those years ago with EOT files, I haven’t used it since, as it was such a pain to set up.

Having said that, I’ve been experimenting in the past weeks with with font embedding in Safari. Its clear that Safari, Firefox and Opera will end up supporting the same standard CSS commands for embedding OpenType and TrueType fonts. It works quite well, and I guess will work in most mobile devices too, as they tend to use browsers based on one of these three.

So it makes me wonder whether this is Microsoft’s last gasp at trying to promote its own technology, when its clear that the world and its browser is moving in a different direction.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

He raises some very good points - paperback books are the size they are not only because they're a comfortable size to fit in the hand but they're also a comfortable size to read in terms of saccadic motion. You don't need to have huge eye movements from the right end of the text to the left upon completing a line, and the entire page is within the central (i.e. 4-5 saccades wide) portion of the vision.

It's why I don't like reading novels on the computer - the screen is too wide. Reading them on the Palm is fine because the screen slightly smaller than a paperback.

I like his concept of a 'reading view', but as qidane pointed out it will have to be tweaked a little for people with non-standard visual requirements. The basic premise of a limited width reading column still remains sound though as the central visual field will remain the same.

[qidane.livejournal.com]

The sample pages look dreadful!

I have text on top of pictures, white text on a white background, and text on top of other text.