Skip to Main Content
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
book

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

by Eric A. Meyer
May 2000
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
472 pages
14h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Font Weights

Even though you may not realize it, you’re already familiar with font weights: boldfaced text is a very common example of an increased font weight. Generally speaking, the darker and “more bold” a font appears, the heavier it is said to be. There are a great many ways to label the heaviness of fonts. For example, the font family known as Zurich has a number of variants such as Zurich Bold, Zurich Black, Zurich UltraBlack, Zurich Light, and Zurich Regular. Each of these uses the same basic font, but each has a different weight.

So let’s say that you want to use Zurich for a document, but you’d like to make use of all those different heaviness levels. You could refer to them directly through the font-family property, but you really shouldn’t have to do that. Besides, it’s no fun having to write a style sheet such as this:

H1 {font-family: 'Zurich UltraBlack', sans-serif;}
H2 {font-family: 'Zurich Black', sans-serif;}
H3 {font-family: 'Zurich Bold', sans-serif;}
H4, P {font-family: Zurich, sans-serif;}
SMALL {font-family: 'Zurich Light', sans-serif;}

Besides the obvious tedium of writing such a style sheet, it only works if everyone has these fonts installed, and it’s pretty safe bet that most people don’t. It would make far more sense to specify a single font family for the whole document and then assign weights ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

Eric A. Meyer
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Cameron Moll

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926226Catalog PageErrata