As mentioned below, I added a web fonts stylesheet to the blog for users of Safari 3.1 and later; however, there’s a deviation between the specification and Safari’s behavior, it seems. The spec says that you should specify a local font to use if available instead of downloading using the full font name of the local font (e.g. “DejaVu Sans Bold Oblique” or “Inconsolata Medium”), but Safari seems to only work right if you specify the family name (“DejaVu Sans” or “Inconsolata”). I think this is a bug in WebKit, and will file a bug report as soon as I get a password to do so, but the specification may be misleading here.

Update: Bug report filed.

For the bleeding-edge Safari and Opera users in the audience, I decided to add CSS3 Web Fonts support to the blog, providing a decent set of fallback fonts for readers; I’m currently using the freely-available DejaVu Sans and Inconsolata typefaces, with the stylesheet designed to only download the fonts if they are not locally-installed already. (Most Linux distributions these days at least include the DejaVu fonts; the next version of Debian will include a ttf-inconsolata package as well.)

While I was off the Internets, Simon Jackman took note of a New York Times Magazine article last Sunday on the typeface that’s sweeping the nation, Clearview, the replacement set of highway sign fonts which was authorized for widespread use a couple of years ago by the Federal Highway Administration after field experiments in Pennsylvania and Texas.

Clearview doesn’t seem to have caught on around these parts yet; the nearest installations I’m aware of are in Houston and a few sporadic signs in Arkansas, most notably at the rebuilt I-55/U.S. 63 interchange north of West Memphis.