As part of my work, I've been asked to create a good looking tag cloud for a homepage. This presents something of a dilemma, as normally I'd shy away from using large font sizes simply because it's quite hard to predict how they are displayed on different screens. It's all very well creating something which looks sweet in Vista with its built in anti-aliasing, but in anything from XP downwards, anti-aliasing is an option which is OFF by default, so you can very quickly turn large text into web horrors.

The answer seems to be sIFR, which allows you to dynamically replace your large font with rendered flash text. To explain - it uses a combination of Java and Flash to replace the target text as the page is loaded. The original html is hidden, not removed, and then the flash plugin renders beautiful true-type font in whatever style you like. Anti-aliased, drop shadow, crisp as you like.

What's better, it's fully accessible and very usable too. If Flash is not installed, or java is turned off, then the browser simply renders the normal HTML with whatever styles you chose. At this point pray the user is in Vista or on a Mac..