Firefox headed toward fancy e-book capabilities?

0

By David Rothman

Firefox 3.5, as shown by the CC-licensed image posted to Flickr by Cellfrozen, is commanding its share of attention.

Now let’s look ahead. What if a browser like Firefox, on machines ranging from desktops to mobile phones, could also serve as a powerful e-book reader, complete with interactivity capabilities?

That day hasn’t come yet, but we can find a little encouragement in a Firefox 3.5 feature—“a new CSS rule,” as described by CNET, “that makes Web typography more attractive.

“@font-face is a CSS rule that allows Web designers to reference fonts not installed on end-user machines. Just as you would have a pointer to a server-based stylesheet or JavaScript file in your Web page code, you can now make reference to a hosted typeface.” Hmm. Special possibilities for Google’s books-in-the-cloud initiatives?

Good sign

Me, I’d have favored powerful ePub capabilities over the fonts-related ones, but this is definitely a good sign. Newspapers such as the New York Times can make good use of the added visual variety.

Additional detail: “Mozilla’s John Daggett explains: Within a stylesheet, each @font-face rule defines a family name to be used, the font resource to be loaded, and the style characteristics of a given face such as whether it’s bold or italic. Firefox 3.5 only downloads the fonts as needed, so a stylesheet can list a whole set of fonts of which only a select few will actually be used.”

0

 Print Friendly