Day 2 and presented by Richard Rutter (ClearLeft), Ian Coyle (iancoyle.com), Samantha Warren (Viget Labs), Jonathan Tan (OmniTi inc) and Elliot Jay Stocks, we all crammed into the small room at the Hilton to watch Web Typography: Quit Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On. A very well-turned up presentation which had the panelists talking about the future of web typography, best ways on how to implement and what are the problems we as developers encounter.

Not much talked out with regards to SifR but moving forwards I guess there is a limited amount of portability on how SifR could be used. The @font-face was discussed at length and using otf and eot (IE) files, but whether the standard will be eot moving forwarded? Not sure. Talks about licencing issues came to a head and how as developers do we protect these licences and to protect our own interest. I mean who wants to spend £200 for a font that gets stolen from someone by purely downloading it from your client’s server. Richard mentioned that he has done this @font-face quite a few times now and simply by adding a rule in the htaccess file, you’ve made a conscious effort to protect the copyright, so if anyone can hack into your server, you can’t be at fault for this.

There was also mention that why choose more than the standard fonts that you get for free from O/S, programs such as Office, Pages, etc. and by using some very simple but clever CSS tricks, there is no reason why you can’t have a selection of, say, 7 different types of fonts on your site, but using only 1 font-family.

• Capitalisation
• Character spacing
• Italics
• Bold

By slight variations and sizes, it could look to the customer that more than one font-family is being used. Very clever.