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An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

Includes border-radius in Internet Explorer. I would love Microsoft to offer a full roadmap of their planned CSS development for IE9.

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Charles Roper

November 23 2009 @ 02:10am #

For me, the most exciting development is support for Direct2D and DirectWrite. In particular, @font-face type rendering will be significantly improved. The race is on now for all browsers to implement DirectWrite. Having @font-face support is one thing, but how those fonts are actually rendered to the screen is another. At present, only Safari does a good job of rendering type. Unless they are hinted exceptionally well, many if not most fonts, particularly at smaller sizes, look absolutely terrible on Windows.

Jon Tan is right when he says, “ClearType fails to deliver good anti-aliasing.” I would expand upon that by saying it also fails to deliver good rendering of badly hinted fonts. So let’s get some pressure on the other browser makers to get DirectWrite support into their browsers now.

At least we now know it’ll feature in IE9 so that vast majority of web users will be able to benefit. Not that they’ll notice.

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Hardboiled Web Design

Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke

How the latest technologies and techniques will make your websites more creative, flexible and adaptable. Get hardboiled in all formats from Five Simple Steps. Digital formats also available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and the iBooks store.

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