Firefox 3
In case you hadn’t noticed, Firefox 3 was released yesterday. It has been a long time coming with several betas and release candidates. I’ve been using it myself as my default browser since Beta 5. I had hoped it was going to be out around the time of the release of ComicPress 2.5 as its rounded corners rendering is so much nicer (as seen in the ComicPress theme - too bad for IE users). Also it should render the Webdings for the comments balloons. Those were two features kind of pushing the no-image styling barrier but it’s always a plus when you can avoid extra images and that was the goal of ComicPress being a theme to be customized (make your own images). The only image in the layout is the background shadow which can actually be produced without images if you really wanted to, like is done in the documentation file.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:27 am
It definitely rounds the corners very nicely. The Webdings comment balloons don’t really seem to be rendering any better for me, though.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I see. It seems they render in Firefox 2/3 on Linux, or Firefox 2 on OS X. But not Firefox 3 for OS X or Windows. Pretty annoying as that font set has a lot of useful graphics for avoiding an image here or there. There is a way to get it to do it by changing/removing the doctype, but that is a bad idea. I’ve also seen tips on customizing your Firefox to display Webding fonts but that isn’t useful for the general public. May need to reconsider using them (not that I didn’t a lot), although the ) and ^ that are instead used are not completely horrible. Both can easily be replaced with actual graphics as well for someone skinning the theme.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Yeah, I was bummed when I first loaded the theme in IE and realized the ) and ^ were comment balloons that didn’t show up in Firefox. I wonder if that’s something that could be filed in Trac for FF3 for a later release version.
July 1st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
You’re correct that they can easily be replaced with actual graphics (and the best way is to decorate the “span” with CSS, rather than use an IMG tag). However, if you really want to use text as a graphic the only way that seems to work reliably is to stick to UNICODE dingbats. Granted, they don’t offer as many options as the Windows “webdings” or “dingbats” do, but Unicode did render the same way for me in IE7, FF3, and Safari when I tested it. In the code I replaced “)” with ✎ (lower-right pencil), and “^” with ✐✐ (2 upper-right pencils) since there are no “balloons” in the Unicode dingbats set. I then changed the style-sheet so “balloons” said “color: #333;font-size: 30px;” (better contrast color, no font-family, bigger dingbat display size).