Summer School

Here's a nice review from the CSS-Tricks website of a few details about CSS that we might forget over time: Little CSS Stuff Newcomers Get Confused About.

Google Fonts -- A Teaching Moment

At our October meeting we discussed Google Fonts, fonts that are on the Google server and can be imported into your webpage using @font. And at the June Web Design SIG meeting, Saul Rosenbaum talked about Google Fonts as a way to add new fonts at no charge without worrying if your users have the fonts on their computers.

Since the October meeting, I have been using Google Fonts on this blog for the headings. I usually use Firefox for my browser, so it was not until our June meeting that I looked at the site in IE and discovered that the headings had reverted to Arial, my next font in the stack. The Google font was not loading in IE, though it worked fine in all other browsers I have tried.

I posted a notice at the Google feedback page, and I contacted the creator of the font. She had also filed a notice with Google. But now, three weeks later, there has not been a fix.

So I added Comic Sans as the second font in the stack (sorry) so that headings would not come up in Arial when viewed in IE. Take a look at this site in IE and in another browser and see the difference.

The lesson to be learned is that this cloud stuff is great, and Google Fonts is a nice example of cloud computing, but keep in mind that you lose some control when you take advantage of these things.

And as always, check your sites in all the browsers you can get your hands on.