@mr_flibble08 @thehodge and @yoast know their SEO but it is essentially 1 part semantic code to infinity parts link-building

A short time after that Joost de Valk (@yoast) replied with this…

@sanchothefat not entirely true, the “infinity” is actually defined by the level of competition.

I can certainly see his point but it left me thinking about whether I was really exaggerating or not. The fact is regardless of your competition you can always be building links to your site by keeping on top of activities such as adding valuable content, getting retweeted, blogged about and so on. If you keep this up even when your competition eventually make every effort to beat your search engine ranking they’ll always be a step behind.

PS. If anyone reading this is looking for an SEO expert I’d be remiss not to mention Erin Ryan over at JP74. Otherwise she’d give me a sound kicking.

One thing I never knew when I started web design was that italics were not simply a way to emphasise text. The correlation of the HTML <em> tag with the default style being italic text was a design choice made in context of the rest of the default styles. It could easily have been that normal paragraph text was italic and for emphasis it was made regular.

What I find interesting about italics is their origin – matching the hand-written style of lettering in order to fit more text into books (for more detail ilovetypography.com has a great series covering the basics of typography). Something my girlfriend said to me while I was bemoaning her use of Comic Sans (even though it was for a children’s worksheet) was that the children find the letter forms easier to read because they more closely resemble letters the way they are taught to write them. It made perfect sense.

Why then, I wonder, do we rarely see larger blocks of copy set in italic? I believe that part of the reason was because italic text served a purpose such as providing narrow but legible text and saving on ink while more often than not there was no lack of space for text or a need to tighten the purse-strings.  Perhaps there is mileage in the use of italics for purposes we instinctively use regular text for. If done well (as illustrated by Wolfgang Weingart in the photo) it can be visually very striking and compelling.

One last thought is that if children are shown beautiful, elegant italic lettering, at least when learning to write cursive, would their hand writing reflect that?

Apologies if that annoying opera fruit’s verbal excretions from the Go Compare adverts gets stuck in your head but I was at a loss for a better name.

Fo’compare is a font comparison tool. It uses a little snippet of flash to get a list of your installed fonts allowing you to choose and view them in your browser. It can be used to help decide on font-stacks for CSS or to help the novice typographer learn all the subtle differences between the thousands of serif faces in circulation.

After playing the Font Game from I Love Typography I was determined to learn the nuances of certain typefaces and fo’compare has already taught me a lot. In particular my favourite observation is the difference between italic and regular ampersands in faces like Garamond or Caslon with its rather ornate and beautiful italic variation.

I guess the web page can be used as an alternative to having font browsing software installed on your computer – although in that regard it could do with a better way to browse your installed fonts such as tagging . Maybe in the next iteration.

Try it out: fo’compare