Windows Safari and the Aliased Fonts Debate

The debate about web typography (and accessibility to some extent) goes on as Safari released their "Beta3" version of Safari for Windows this week and an interesting debate arises - should fonts be automatically aliased as per Apple's Safari?

We've seen, and in my case touted, sIfr and then we discovered the frailties of design with varibale width fonts etc etc... Then Apple go and release yet another browser for us to test against... Safari on Windows. Now take away the super efficient rendering engine, which I adore for quick Google queries, and take a look at how it renders fonts... Yes that's right - the Apple rendering engine rears it's head.

I'm not going to get into a Microsoft versus Apple debate here (or here care of Joel Spolsky), as personally I believe there is a case for both sides. However what I am going to say that for pure usability versus design it's my opinion that aliased fonts combat the design issue (nice headers, graphical navigation etc) and anti-aliased fonts combat the readability issue (i.e. a big blob of text is indefinately more readable in non-aliased Arial that aliased Helvetica for example.

So before I turn this into a massive ramble about text replacement concepts like sIfr and dynamic image creation with JavaScript (et al) replacement methods... It appears the W3C are actually considering this with the font-smooth property in the CSS3 Fonts module.

So why the hell are they taking so long? This is the fast moving web not print for goodness sake...

Read more about the CSS3 module: Fonts