5
Web Fonts
The features covered in this chapter are
the oldest in this book, having been intro-
duced in CSS2 many years ago—only to be
dropped from the 2.1 spec owing to a lack ofimplementation by browser makers. Now a new gen-
eration of browsers has revived interest in improving
the typographical options available to web designers, and I, for one, wel-
come the return of these features in CSS3. Chief among them is the ability
to specify fonts that don’t already exist on the user’s system—by utilizing
the @font-face method—which frees designers from the yoke of the standard
pal ette of “web-safe” system fonts that have been used for many years. Sur-
pris ingly, this capability has been available in Internet Explorer since 1997!
IE4 was the first browser to allow web fonts, but it did so with a propri-
etary format that prevented other browsers from following suit. Microsoft
later submitted its format to the W3C for consideration as a standard, but
in the meantime Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all backed a different set
of formats (see “Font Formats” on page 52), so later versions of Internet
Explorer eventually followed suit.
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