Disabling ClearType for Your Site...

Recently at work, I was asked "How come the ClearType isn't rendering on the page you coded?" I wasn't sure why. I didn't care much either as I personally don't like how ClearType renders. (I think it makes text blurry and more difficult to read, especially on smaller fonts...)

So after some research (Googling) I found out why from the IEBlog, this post in particular: Notes on the interaction of ClearType with DXTransforms in IE7.

It states:

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.

Oh, ok. Hmmm, since I personally do not like ClearType, all I have to do in order to disable it form my personal web site, Martinator.com, is to apply a DXTransform filter to the BODY tag that essentially does nothing :-)

body {
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient
            (GradientType=0, 
             StartColorStr='#00FFFFFF',
             EndColorStr='#00FFFFFF'); 
     }

Now my site is ClearType free and the smaller fonts no longer render as "blurry."