BBC News is sporting a new design today, and it's very nice. Just one problem - they're using the webkit-font-smoothing: antialiasing trick to make the text look worse in Safari 5 and Chrome. The text in Safari 5 is anaemic and not OS X-like at all, whereas Firefox 4 respects OS X's sub-pixel text rendering technique.

Greyscale antialiasing in text rendering was a powerful development back in the days of the CRT, giving us smooth text without the "jagged edges," but the TFT offered us something with 3 times the horizontal resolution: sub-pixel rendering. JavaScript legend Thomas Fuchs even developed Textorize as a way for you to make graphics with sub-pixel rendered text because it's that much better.

It's crazy to revert to an antiquated CRT-age antialiasing technique when sub-pixel rendering offers increased resolution and legibility on TFT displays (due to the 3x better horizontal resolution). Unless, of course, you're going for that old-school 90s (or Windows) vibe. We might as well revert back to using MPEG1 and GIF files if using antiquated technologies unsuited to modern systems is de rigeur.

Previously, I'd only seen this hack being used by far-out designers and people who didn't know any better, but now that a site as big as BBC News is getting in on the craziness I dare say there'll be a lot of copycats. There's nothing wrong with people who "prefer" this old-school style of rendering, but it's on a par with loving old Nintendo games or scratched up vinyl. There's an aesthetic worth loving there, but it's an antiquated and mostly irrelevant one in terms of being "better."