September 2001
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
31h 42m
English
Content preview from Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd EditionBecome 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,
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Typography on the Web
HTML was created with the intent of putting ultimate control of the presentation in the hands of the end user. This principle makes its most resounding impact when it comes to typography. Take a look at your browser’s preferences and you will find that you (and every other surfer) are able to specify the fonts and sizes that you prefer for online viewing.
For anyone accustomed to designing for other media, this loss of font control is cause for major frustration. From the time they discovered the Web, designers (and their corporate clients) have been pushing for ways to control typography in order to produce attractive and predictable web sites.
Great strides have been made in this effort since the early days of the Web and HTML 1.0; however, as of this writing, the font issue is still unfolding. This section discusses possible strategies and technologies (along with their advantages and disadvantages) for designing type in web documents.
You Have Two Fonts
About the only thing you can be sure of when you’re designing web pages with basic HTML is that you have two fonts to work with: a proportional font and a fixed-width font. The problem is that you don’t know specifically which fonts these are or at what size they will be displayed.
Proportional font
A proportional font (called “Variable Width Font” in Netscape Navigator) is one that allots different amounts of space to each character, based on its design. For instance, in a proportional font, a capital “W” ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.