Archive for August, 2006

Hello again, this is Peter Gurevich, IE PM for ClearType (among other things, as my blog posts have shown).  Today I want to give you a little heads up on an issue we have seen with DXTransforms and ClearType,  and let you know what we have done to ensure good readability of text in IE. 

During our testing we noticed that DXTransforms are sometimes applied to elements that contain text (now rendered in ClearType).  As our users also noticed, the ClearType text then looks extremely blurry - unfortunately these two technologies just don’t mix well.  This is because the basic convolution transform used by DXTransforms does not take into account the spatial nature of ClearType.

To ensure good readability of Text in IE, in the Release Candidate build we decided to disable ClearType on elements that use any DXTransform.  We will render the text in those elements as aliased text, in order to increase readability.  The rest of the text in the page will render with ClearType.  This may explain why some sites (or portions of sites) will render as aliased text, rather than ClearType.

Thanks, and I look forward to continuing to use your feedback to improve IE.

Peter Gurevich
Program Manager

Everyone knows how it feels to lose someone. A close friend of mine lost his father to cancer when we were still in elementary school, and a few years ago his mother succumbed to the disease after fighting through several bouts of chemotherapy and radiation.

Celebrities experience the same sadness and pain that we do when a loved one dies. Cindy Crawford lost her younger brother to leukemia, and is helping to fight the disease by working with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and promoting the Light the Night Walk.

She’s asking how we can make curing cancer a global priority. The millions of people dying from the disease or who have relatives with cancer all know that this is a fight we can win. They are all holding on to the hope that one day soon, we will.

If anyone is interested, here is a group dedicated to those looking for information regarding prevention methods and cures for cancer.

Lydia

Your site may already be included in our crawl index, but we want to ensure that you also know how you can supplement these results with Google Base - you can submit the products or services that you offer directly to Google Base making them eligible to show on Google.com when a user searches on a relevant query.

Google Base allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline information; whether it's a large selection of shoes that you sell online or information about your consulting service, we'll make it easier for people to find it on Google. If your product or service isn't online yet, we can help you put it there -- for free.

For example, let's say you use AdWords to advertise your job search service. With Google Base, you can include specific information about job offers like title, job description, location and salary and we'll display them in relevant search results on Google, helping you to increase awareness about your service. The more details you include about the information you want to share, the greater the likelihood it will be found by those looking for exactly what you have to offer.

If you're ready to submit information to Google Base, there are currently three ways to do so: you can upload individual items manually via a web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload, or use our just-released API.

No matter how you choose to submit your info, we hope you'll find this to be a worthwhile addition to the targeted traffic you are already getting from your AdWords campaigns.