if the big goodie in windows xp is sub-pixel font rendering (aka "cleartype"), somebody is condemning catastrophe for flirting with desaster.

joel spoolsky writes in his article "three wrong ideas from computer science": "if you try to read a paragraph of antialiased text, it just looks blurry. there's nothing i can do about it, it's the truth. [...] using a form of antialiasing they call 'cleartype' designed for color lcd screens [...], i'm sorry, still looks blurry, even on a color lcd screen".

text, especially tiny one, is best legible on a screen using screen fonts like verdana (to mention the most widely used one): "instead of creating a high-resolution font and then trying to hammer it into the pixel grid, they [joel refers to the microsoft typography group, but i rather would refer to the typography-savvy generally*] finally accepted the pixel grid as a 'given' and designed a font that fits neatly into it".

we need more pixels, not more blurring techniques.

* while microsoft indeed made screen fonts available for almost everyone due to their power of distribution, i don't think it is justified to claim they've invented screen fonts. there are countless screen fonts but as they still have to be installed on the client machine to be displayed in an html document, they could not get that popular (although e.g. jason kottke's "silkscreen" made it into the hearts and font collections of state-of-the-art graphic designers). similarly, microsoft did not invent the mechanisms behind "cleartype". as steve gibson details: "twenty-two years ago apple ii programmers wer using these techniques". and gibson is not the only one who doubts that "cleartype" is a technological breakthrough by microsoft. ron feigenblatt reports about his "research into the problem of rendering on color mosaic matrix displays", which took place in the late 1980s. this also might be from importance since we have to cope with another patent issue here (and ask ourselves what the hell apple was doing in the meantime).