Web Design Advice

Don't just use gray text on white background. If you really want to make your text difficult to read, you will achieve even better results with white text on white background.

Upd: I am not alone who thinks so: http://contrastrebellion.com/

Semantic Versioning is Not the Solution

People often think they can introduce incompatible changes in their library API, and just increase major version number, as semantic versioning proposes, to save the library clients from problems.

It is not true.

Consider a dependency tree:

my-application
  web-server 1.1.1
    commons-logging 1.1.1
  db-client 1.1.1
    commons-logging 1.1.1
  authentication 1.1.1
    commons-logging 1.1.1

Now commons-logging changes its API incompatibly and is released as commons-logging 2.0.1. Authentication adopts commons-logging 2.0.1 while other libraries still depend on 1.1.1:

my-application
  web-server 1.1.1
    commons-logging 1.1.1
  db-client 1.1.1
    commons-logging 1.1.1
  authentication 1.1.2
    commons-logging 2.0.1

Now my-application is broken, because the dependency tree includes two versions of commons-logging which share packages, class/functions names, and thus can not be loaded simultaneously.

When you release an incompatible API this way, you essentially split the world of dependent libraries into two parts: the ones depending on the old version, and ones depending in new version. Libraries from the first part can not be used together with libraries from the second part.

A better way to introduce incompatible API is to release it as a new library, for example commons-logging2, or new-logging. Make it possible to use the new library simultaneously with the old one, e.g. it should have new package name.
Doing so will protect clients in majority of cases.

If we are releasing new library for new API, there is no need for such a thing as "major version number".

NB: in some module managers, most notably in javascript, there are no global package/class names on which different versions of a library can interfere. But in majority of programming languages that problem exists.

Какие похожие картинки. Очень надеюсь, что до похожего результата дело не дойдет.

How many more years it will take Chrome and FireFox to learn display text properly?

These are original size screenshots of some page heading.
I think such bad results may be achieved if Chrome and FireFox rasterize first and scale after that, instead of scaling first and then rasterizing.
To reproduce, here is the code: <h1 style="font-size: 300%; color: #4f81bd; font-style: italic; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">WINTER ACTION</h1>

Update: Many people reported FireFox and Chrome render fonts OK for them. HN comment and tnm91 suggested that DirectWrite may be disabled, due to outdated video driver. It was true, I updated diver and DirectWrite become enabled, but rendered hadn't changed. Then sulliwan suggested to check CliearType - I enabled it and now FireFox and Chrome render text OK.

Thanks for the help!