Several readers have noted some problems in the display of my comments entry form, courtesy of the very recent iterations of Safari released with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and, of course, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In essence, what were once orderly boxes now appear tumbled and in disarray when rendered by the new versions of this Web browser. The form remains fully functional; it’s presentation has just been more or less destroyed, is all. This is a byproduct of Apple’s vigilant, ongoing improvements to Safari’s CSS rendering engine, a process which I wholeheartedly support, in theory… I won’t lie to you, though, the fact that little bugs like this continue to arise annoys the heck out of me.
This problem can be remedied, of course, and I will try and find a little time to fix it up in the next few days. What concerns me a bit more is the more subtle change to the way Mac OS X renders anti-aliased text in at least some installations of Tiger. Have a look, if you will, at the old, Panther method of rendering the Subtraction.com navigation bar, below. It’s slim and elegant and it respects the shape of the typeface. Compare that to Tiger’s rendering method, directly beneath, which is fatter and less true to the typeface’s forms. Something has changed under the hood here — something having to do with the way type is rendered from my PowerBook, because this isn’t happening on my desktop G4 — and I don’t know if I like it. If you know what’s up, please let me know.