As I’ve mentioned before, now that I’ve “closed” RAILhead Design, I’m going through the process of *finally* moving all my various stuff to the domain name I’ve had for I don’t know how long: maurymccown.com. Right now, I’m waiting for my web host to open-up server migration again (which should happen mid-April), then I’ll begin the move in earnest.

Until then, I’m tinkering with my new site’s “coming soon” page, and in so doing, I’ve come to enjoy fiddling with some cool CSS capabilities. In particular, I’m loving the text-shadow and web font capabilities — though only a couple of browsers (Safari 3.1 and Opera) fully support both.

To show what I mean, let’s look at the text-shadow attribute. For ages, those of us that love drop shadows were forced to create PNGs or JPGs to get our nice shadowing, but now this capability is getting more and more popular with front-running web browsers, so it’s totally doable with CSS and “plain” HTML text. Take a look at the screen shot below, and notice the portion where I say “In the mean time…” That shadow effect is applied to the text via CSS — it’s not an image. Cool, eh? One really nice thing about this is that it can reduce the page download time because there will (at some point) be no need to grab a bunch of image files to render a page.Another really cool attribute that’s in the earliest stages of propagation is the downloadable/web font. This allows your site to grab a font file to use for display purposes, rather than rely on the user’s system to have the font installed. For my site, I’m using a custom font that no one else on Earth has on their computer. To make sure you see my site the way I want you to, to avoid grabbing loads of images, and to make my site more future-customizable, I can have my CSS grab the font off my server.

What you see here is that I grabbed the custom font to change the “In the mean time…” text, applied it via CSS, and kept the link text my standard body font. Now, how freakin’ cool is that? The bad thing about downloadable fonts is that most browsers don’t fully support them, so it’s a bad idea to use them for now. The jury is still out regarding whether or not this feature will become standardized, mainly due to font design copyright worries. We’ll see.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share those cool features even though most browsers don’t support them yet. And go ahead and keep your eyes on maurymmcown.com, too.