Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

Fonts and Text

The font property has also picked up a few new values in CSS2:

caption
icon
menu
message-box
small-caption
status-bar

These values give the font property the ability to match the font family, size, weight, and so forth, according to the settings users have specified on their computers. For example, icons on a Macintosh are typically labeled using 9-point Geneva. Assuming that hasn’t been changed by the user, any font declaration with a value of icon will result in 9-point Geneva for that text—as long as the page is viewed using a Macintosh:

SPAN.OScap {font: icon;}  /* will look like icon labels in OS */

On a Windows system, of course, the font would come out different, and under other window managers (like X), it would look different still. The flexibility is certainly interesting, and it allows the author to easily create pages that have an appearance familiar to the user.

New Font Properties

The font section gains two new properties in CSS2. font-size-adjust is intended to help browsers make sure that text will be the intended size, regardless of whether the browser can use the font specified in the style sheet. It is often a problem that authors will call for a font that is not available to the user, and when another font is substituted, it’s either too big or too small to read comfortably. This new property addresses that very problem, and should be very useful for authors who want to make sure that their documents are readable no matter what font is substituted. ...