Lately the debate over fonts on the web has flared up again, and I find myself reading the same arguments over and over again. In particular, a lot of people seem convinced that widespread font embedding on the web would kill font foundries instantly. As a child of the internets, I respectfully disagree.

Think about it: we find ourselves in a world where, somehow, web designers are still making a living. They produce a product which consists entirely of unencrypted HTML, CSS and images, made available via a simple HTTP request. Ripping and hotlinking of design is frowned upon, and mostly limited to amateur users who use free services like Blogger and MySpace. Plus, we all know that often pirates are the kind of people who would not pay if the ripped material was not available for free, so there is very little actual revenue being lost here.

In fact, if we look at the actual professionals, we find that generally they treat each other's work with the utmost respect, and actively inform their colleagues of blatant abuse and stealing. We have a perfect example of a thriving industry which revolves around free distribution of copyrighted-but-DRM-free assets and which polices itself.

We're not that far from having something similar for fonts. Part of the problem is that the foundries are trying to protect their fonts by bringing out the lawyers. But so far, they've only managed to inconvenience and annoy their legitimate customers, for example with embedding restrictions on PDFs for screen vs print.

The Edge Foundation has this event called the World Question Center where every year, they ask some of the world's brightest thinkers one Big Question. Last year it was What have you changed your mind about and why?

I loved pouring over the answers, mostly because many of them described a shift in the writer's thinking, rather than just changing their opinion on a particular fact.

However thinking about what my answer would be, I couldn't really come up with something I felt strongly about. That was until recently, when I saw a very poignant speech on racism. The crystallization of 'race' as an artificial descriptor of culture finally put concrete words onto something that had been in the back of my head for years now. Here goes.

What did I change my mind about and why?

As you may know, I'm a sci-fi nerd, hence I've been pretty excited about the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series coming to a close. So, me and my fellow connoisseur of the awesome, Greg, put together a quick survey on Google Docs to get predictions about the end of the show. The internets filled it in.

The Battlestar nerdery was all in good fun, but more interestingly, I also asked a question about how people watch the show: via live broadcast, recorded or downloaded? Legally or illegally? Depending on your point of view, these results are either entirely obvious, or quite surprising. So far, 313 people filled in the survey, which was advertised only through blogs and Twitter for two days:

Given the circumstances, the people who answered this fit two descriptions. One, they are fan enough to actually fill out a survey about a show on TV. Two, they read blogs, talk on Twitter, hang out in forums, i.e. they know and use the web intimately. So, SciFi channel SyFy, NBC Universal, all big name media: do you see that big green chunk of people who download your shows illegally? These are merely potential customers that you haven't reached yet.

Recently we launched our new product at Strutta, a 'create your own contest site' web service. In each contest, users submit and vote on each other's videos, pictures, songs or writings.

As part of the research we did for the development, we wanted to examine our competition. So, I dove into YouTube to try and figure out some of their ideas and algorithms. For me, this wasn't entirely new: when I posted my Line Rider videos to YouTube, I followed up each video with manual statistics tracking and gained some insight into how a video becomes popular on YouTube. However, that only gave me a very narrow view of the community and its dynamics.

Since then though, things have changed a lot. YouTube now has a public API as well as pre-made libraries to use. With these, it becomes very easy to collect statistics and perform your own analysis. So, armed with Python, I set out to investigate YouTube's ubiquitous 'related videos' feature.

Update: and now, IE8 adds even more odd behavior to the mix!

A while ago, John Resig pointed out some issues with sub-pixel positioning in CSS. The problem he used is one of percentage-sized columns inside a container, where the resulting column widths don't round evenly to whole pixels or don't sum to the correct total. His conclusion is that browsers each have their own way of dealing with the problem.

I've recently been bumping into a related issue however, that shows the situation is even worse: rounding is inconsistent even inside a single browser.

Take the following scenario: a fixed width element that is horizontally centered in a viewport using margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;. The viewport has a horizontally centered background image, having background-position: 50% 0. This is an extremely common page structure.

You'd logically expect the background image and the element to line up, and move as one when the viewport is resized. However, this is not the case. Depending on the viewport width, the background can be offset one pixel to the left or right. This obviously wreaks havoc on many designs. I decided to investigate this more closely and the results are not pretty.

The Canvas tag's popularity is slowly increasing around the web. I've seen big sites use it for image rotation, graph plotting, reflection effects and much more.

However, Canvas is still limited to 2D: its drawing operations can only do typical vector graphics with so-called affine transformations, i.e. scaling, rotating, skewing and translation. Though there have been some efforts to try and add a 3D context to Canvas, these efforts are still experimental and only available for a minority of browsers through plug-ins.

So when my colleague Ross asked me if we could build a Cover Flow-like widget with JavaScript, my initial reaction was no... but really, that's just a cop out. All you need are textured rectangles drawn in a convincing perspective: a much simpler scenario than full blown 3D.