TrueType font embedding has come to iPhone and iPad, Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. That is to say, Mobile Safari now supports CSS embedding of lower-bandwidth, higher-quality, more ubiquitous TrueType fonts. This is huge. Test on your device(s), then read and rejoice:

The Typekit Blog: iOS 4.2 improves support for web fonts
iOS 4.2 is also the first version of Mobile Safari to support native web fonts (in TrueType format) instead of SVG. This is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher.

Ryan N.: Confirmed: TrueType Font Support on Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2
Thanks to Matt Wiebe for mentioning the rumour that Mobile Safari on iOS 4.2 supports TrueType fonts and providing a handy link to test.

TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes. With widely varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.

More about webfonts
If you’re coming late to the party, the following bits of required reading and listening will get you up to speed on the joys (and occasional frustrations) of “real type” on the web:

Bulletproof @font-face syntax, Paul Irish, 4 September, 2009

Web Fonts at the Crossing, Richard Fink, 8 June 2010, A List Apart
Big Web Show Episode 1, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype with Ethan Dunham of Fontspring and Font Squirrel and Jeffrey Veen of Typekit
Big Web Show Episode 18, Dan Benjamin and I discuss webtype, screen resolution, and more with Roger Black

Thanks
My thanks to David Berlow of Font Bureau for waking me from my Thanksgiving stupor and alerting me to this exciting slash overdue development.

Now we have something else to be thankful for. Nathan Smith of Sonspring has created a library that gives designers and developers “some measure of control over form elements, without changing them so drastically as to appear foreign in a user’s operating system.” Smith calls his new library Formalize CSS:

I’ve attempted to bridge the gap between various browsers and OS’s, taking the best ideas from each, and implementing what is possible across the board. For the most part, this means most textual form elements have a slight inset, and all buttons look consistent, including the button tag.

For more, including demos, options, screenshots, thanks, and the library itself, read Smith’s write-up at SonSpring | Formalize CSS. Hat tip and happy Thanksgiving to my good friend Aaron Gustafson for sharing this gem.

Another week, another responsive web site.

Two weeks ago, it was St. Paul’s School. Last week, it was Salter Cane. This week, I’ve been working on next year’s UX London site, implementing a nice little design refresh courtesy of Paul.

More pages will be added soon but for now, it’s essentially like a poster for the conference.

Back when I was working on the first UX London site two years ago, I was building it together with Natalie, and I mean literally together: we were pair-programming. Well, I guess programming isn’t quite right for HTML and CSS, but we were pair-writing. It was an excellent experience.

Anyway, Natalie being Natalie, the UX London site was built with rock-solid markup with a flexible layout. All the pieces were in place for a responsive web design so once I was done with the current refresh, I spent a few minutes writing some media queries.

You can see the results for yourself.

Tagged with
css
design
adaptive
responsive
css3
mediaqueries
uxlondon

Learn to love vendor prefixes and create full-screen backgrounds that resize to fit the viewport in Issue No. 309 of A List Apart for people who make websites:

Prefix or Posthack
by ERIC MEYER

Vendor prefixes: Threat or menace? As browser support (including in IE9) encourages more of us to dive into CSS3, vendor prefixes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-animation may challenge our consciences, along with our patience. But while nobody particularly enjoys writing the same thing four or five times in a row, prefixes may actually accelerate the advancement and refinement of CSS. King of CSS Eric Meyer explains why.

Supersize that Background, Please!
by BOBBY VAN DER SLUIS

Background images that fill the screen thrill marketers but waste bandwidth in devices with small viewports, and suffer from cropping and alignment problems in high-res and widescreen monitors. Instead of using a single fixed background size, a better solution would be to scale the image to make it fit different window sizes. And with CSS3 backgrounds and CSS3 media queries, we can do just that. Bobby van der Sluis shows how.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.