Bill Hill: The Future of Reading on the Web, Part 1 | Dan

jonathansampson
stick a scissor in you eye!

Guys, please, please, oh please mic your talent Smiley

daSmirnov

Nice to see Bill Hill again.

I remember playing with WEFT3 3 or 4 years ago for some of my websites. It's good to know that it will be opened up so hopefully everyone will latch onto it.

I've also been experimenting with some of the new Vista and Office fonts on the web, but compared to Verdana they're a bit smaller, enough so that I'd like to make them an extra pt larger. I understand that the current CSS3 specs have an ability to set the size of individual fonts which could eleviate this issue. Any chance we could see this implemented in IE8?

Getting things resolution indepedent is probably the biggest challenge in computing, a lot of people are still stuck in their ways that things should be measued in pixels - I just had a running argument with somebody on it this week, that higher resolution screens should mean more work space, not higher resolution applications and text.

I've got one screen here that is about 144 DPI, Windows looks absolutely amazing on it (the machine came set to 120 DPI by default). It's just a shame I still come across applications that break, and websites that define font size in pixels. Hopefully once we start getting better support for higher DPI computer manufacterers will be more willing to up the DPI of their displays and it'll really take off.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Great video. I've gone the embedding route myself a few times and would love for it to work across browsers and OSs. It's nice that you can embed the Windows fonts like Verdana but pointless since IE on Windows is the only browser that understands the embedding so they'll have the font anyway. Smiley

Stepping away from the browser for a moment, Windows itself is a typographic mess, and I really hope that gets solved in Windows 7. Segoe UI is a great font, but Windows still uses the old fonts MS Sans Serif and Tahoma all over the place. Sometimes it even uses multiple fonts in the same dialog (e.g. the new Vista style common file dialogs) which just looks messy.

This is especially horrible on Asian systems. Where Vista uses Segoe UI on western systems, it uses the brilliant new Meiryo font on Japanese. Meiryo is a great font, ClearType enabled, I absolutely love it. Then half the system still uses MS UI Gothic, which is a bitmap font with no anti-aliasing at all at the smaller sizes. This looks incredibly jarring. It's simply not an acceptable situation and I'm appaled that a company that according to Bill Hill's claims takes typography seriously could release such a mess.

Related, in Vista, even with IE8 beta 2, MS UI Gothic is still the default Japanese font in Internet Explorer. It's one of the first things I change in IE usually. Apparently screen reading in the browser is only important to Microsoft if you use the Roman alphabet. There are no good Asian fonts available for web designers since Meiryo and the other new Asian fonts are available only on Vista. The fact that IE does not implement CSS font fallback correctly also doesn't help here if you have a webpage that mixes Roman and Asian characters.

I also want to thank Bill for putting me onto eBooks with one of the early videos. I do nearly all my reading on my trusty Dell Axim X51v and don't leave the house without it. It makes all those train rides so much more bearable without having to drag heavy paper books around. I have however been forced to dump Microsoft Reader because its DRM activation system has now made it impossible for me to buy any more books (because you need to activate for that and I can't do that anymore). I now use eReader which has the added benefit of being able to specify the font you want to use, and I found Calibri looks really nice on my Axim's 192DPI display with ClearType. Smiley

I also use Meiryo on my PocketPC for my own Japanese dictionary application. Whenever I show that to anyone who's not seen Meiryo before I'm generally met with disbelief at just how readable it is. Big kudos to the guys who created that font.

CKurt
while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

In reply to Sven Groot

#Oct 9th, 2008 @ 9:35 AM

How would i go to embed a word font on my website ? Or is this only possible in Internet Eplorer ? Didn't really get an answer in the great video.

dentaku

It ends abruptly but that is still one of the most informative videos on C9 in a very long time.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to dentaku

#Oct 9th, 2008 @ 10:39 AM

This is only the first part Smiley

Stay tuned for more Bill Hill!

jason818_253.33
Yippi skippy

I’m not a fast reader. But I like to read. I take my time to take every thing in. I went and started to read the book found on your web site, The Mabinogion. I read for about an hour. I read about the fountain, the castles and black nights of who acquire mortal wounds to the head with a sword. All interesting stuff. I pushed F11 and read the book at full screen mode on my 19" monitor desk top computer. I would like to go back and pick up were I have left off. Some kind of book mark would be nice.

Something I really miss about reading on screen is having an actual book in my hand something I can touch. A physical representation of volume. I had a hard time getting a good representation of how far into the book I was in relation to the finish. I saw the page numbers and that helped some. I had to page threw several button pushes to see how close I was to finishing the chapter. I don’t know if this is relevant to any one ells but it’s my first thought when reading. I like knowing how big the book is im reading. I evaluate the time i have to reading. I like to be able to finish the storys i start.

I liked the font, it was clear to read. Much more clear than the Gutenberg.org. The button up at the center top broke me away from reading. Maybe a button at the bottom right on the last page might help so I don’t have to search as far for the method to turn the next page. I think scrowling also distracts from reading.

(Edit: links to the different chapters would also be nice. )
(Edit: i went back and finished the first story. in the book)

mwirth

hm this is a little bit of fanboy-ism that im exhibiting here.. but i must say that the hike around the ms campus with bill hill is still my favorite video on channel9. im actually thinking about the topic of this interview once in a while.... it has been a joy to watch it. havent seen this current video yet because of time constraints. but i sure will do so soon Big Smile

just wanted to say thanks for another bill hill video! ... and thanks for this wave of videos these days.. still have my hopes up that we'll see a herb sutter interview about concur Wink

;)
thanks charles, bill and team!

raymond

Fascinating video!

Discuss the issues with type in videos displayed on a web site?

Regarding assumptions, thought you would enjoy:

The Assumption Song