Developing with Web Standards

Chapter Fifteen: Web Fonts

For most of its history, the web has been a text-based medium. Despite this, the range of fonts available to web designers and developers has been severely limited. Unless a font is installed on a user’s system, a designer can’t use it, so we’ve been forced to rely on a small palette of fonts installed on both major web browsing platforms, Mac OS X and Windows. Despite the fact that both OS X and Windows come with dozens of installed fonts, the overlap between the two platforms is small. As we’ve seen, CSS does provide a mechanism for specifying a group of fonts so the browser has fallback options if a specific font isn’t installed. Unless we specify a group of fonts that have roughly the same default size, the legibility ...