...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Typekit launched today (details here).
This will change the way you design websites. Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.
I haven't had a chance to play around with this yet, but hope to soon. And hey, you can use Silkscreen with Typekit.
Jeff Veen has a look at how Typekit protects fonts served through the service.
To that end, our Javascript is minified and the fonts themselves are represented as Base64 encoded strings. You may see right through this, but the vast majority of web users wouldn't know what to make of it.
Those Base64 encoded strings are then placed right into the CSS file. And even better than that, the fonts are split up into multiple files and recombined using the CSS font stack. Pretty clever stuff.
Typekit is an upcoming typeface hosting service which will provide vetted fonts that you can include in your site's stylesheet using the @font-face mechanism.
That's where Typekit comes in. We've been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We've built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
What a great idea. And web entrepreneurs pay attention, this is how to make a compelling online property: take an idea that everyone loves in theory but doesn't use in practice because it's a pain in the ass (in this case, embedding type on the web) and offer a hosting service to solve that problem. YouTube did this with videos, Blogger/Blogspot, TypePad, & Wordpress did this with blogs, Flickr did it with photos, etc. etc.
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives.
web development (74) • typography (143)
See more on the Job Board.
Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or best of.
The 2000s (14) • post updates (43) • video (746) • USA (13) • movies (1072) • books (737) • science (634) • lists (646) • food (666) • photography (821) • art (389) • best of (372) • sports (486) • advertising (178) • maps (234)
movies (1072) • photography (821) • video (746) • books (737) • NYC (694) • food (666) • lists (646) • science (634) • design (612) • sports (486) • music (405) • art (389) • business (382) • best of (372) • TV (370)
photography (821) • economics (202) • lists (646) • best of (372) • infoviz (163) • food (666) • NYC (694) • firstworldproblems (4) • cities (135) • restaurants (188) • video (746) • timelapse (3) • interviews (256) • language (272) • maps (234) • fashion (164) • NSFW (63) • remix (207)
trolls (2) • tshirts (28) • magazines (97) • code (4) • andreagassi (3) • illusion (2) • networks (4) • Phillip Toledano (3) • butter (2) • painting (5) • friendster (4) • Grigory Perelman (5) • groundhogday (3) • Wii (56) • voip (3)