Anti-aliased font in HTML page

+1 Hank's comment. You have very little to gain by doing this. Some desktop browsers (including IE7+ and Safari) turn on anti-aliasing by default even when it's off at an OS level, and modern (post-XP) OSs tend to turn it on by default anyway. By forcing AA on the rest, you'll:

(+) improve the display a little for IE6 and XP+Firefox users who unwittingly don't have AA

(-) make loading slower for everyone (but especially users of limited mobile devices)

(-) defeat preferred font sizes

(-) unnecessarily annoy the luddites who deliberately disable anti-aliasing because it's “all blurry”(*)

(*: there are limited cases where this does even make sense, particularly for old, fuzzy CRT monitors.)

a) Of course you can use browser detection. The easiest way to do this is probably using jQuery's browser method. (jQuery is an awesome JavaScript library that makes a lot of JS-development easier in case you haven't heard)

Depending on what browser (or OS) results you get, you could present the user with different solutions, from normal text to something like a Flash solution.

However, I advise against it. Things look better on new machines than old ones. That's just the way it is, which is why I recommend against spending precious time on minor glitches in older browsers. -- Unless users with older browsers are your main demographic of course. In this case, how about you just do it in Flash altogether? No use coding up two solutions if one always works, right?

b) You can in fact create anti-aliased text via JavaScript. Have a look at my project Die Stimme Gottes ("Voice of God" -- not for the religiously squeamish) for an example. In this project, I used the excellent typeface.js for this.

c) Just use CSS, maybe?

h1.welcome {
    background: url('the-welcome-image.png') no-repeat;
    color: transparent;

}