A few months ago I ran across Chip Cullen’s absolutely fantastic ligatures.js – a very simple jQuery function that manually replaces character pairs or triplets with their corresponding unicode ligature. There was just one problem: to use the function, you had to manually test each of the characters you wanted to use against the target font. This is potentially a lot of work, especially if you have multiple custom fonts on your page. Read on, intrepid explorer →
Trent Walton is one of my favorite developer/designer types. In a class he taught at a recent conference, he challenged people to make good use of the best CSS3 and modern Javascript tools to reproduce movie poster titling with nothing but web interface tools. You’ll have to see the results to believe them. My favorite? Toy Story. New Adventures 2012→
The more time I spend reading things on the internet, the more obvious it is to me that measure matters. Too many sites still have lines running to well over 100 characters. (I saw one recently that runs to 135, and many online technical manuals still run to the full width of the page!) It’s just hard to read.
I locked this site in at between 66 and 72 characters, and it makes a difference. I hope, eventually, that everyone gets this right. In the meantime, Instapaper and Readability carry the day!