[HoofHearted]

I was all for anti-aliased text in web browsers - it was all very OSX, and Omniweb made it look beautiful.

But now?? Well I'm hoping browser developers will use some discretion.

Yesterday I looked at one of my own pages with 10px verdana text. Perfectly legible, verdana was made for screen reading., and even antialiased it was ok-ish - but a bit smudgy. My problem started when Iooked at the same page with the same text, but in white on a black background.

Non-AA, it was still perfectly legible and (of course) crisp. In an AA browser like Mozilla 1.1/Chimera it almost disappeared in a swill of mid-gray anti-aliased tones.

What would it take for developers to realise that below a certain size (say 11-12px CSS size), fonts would probably benefit from NOT being AA.

Being able to set that threshold doesn't help me - I can't put instructions on every web page for every user with an AA browser. It should be set by default for the benefit of the end user.

I'm all for anti-aliasing, I'm just for readability as well.

[himself]

I think the problem with anti-aliasing is inherent to OSX, not AA in itself... there are different "formulas" to AA text to achieve different levels of quality depending on your display. In my opinion, OSX uses what is probably the worst "formula" available. At the very least, OSX should have options to choose between different AA rendering options, especially since text rendered using the same AA engine might look good on a CRT, and then look horrible on an LCD, and vice versa. It's funny... WinXP has an option to use different AA renderers depending on whether you use an LCD or not, and the quality is better than the AA in OSX, in my opinion. Even Adobe Acrobat has a system for optimizing anti-aliasing. What I would like to see implemented in OSX is something like the Acrobat system and the options you get in Photoshop/Imageready, where you can choose between crisp, smooth, strong, or sharp rendereing (or none). Click that feedback button in your dock and let Apple know what they should implement in the upcoming OSX revisions...