New Perspectives On Web Design

(C. Jardin) #1

CHAPTER 9 The Next Steps for Web Typography


luxury villas for rent in Dubrovnik, Croatia^49. Knowing that Dubrovnik in
the past has had strong cultural and economic connections to Venice and
Florence — which influenced the city’s development and prosperity in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — made it very easy for us to select Arno as
the main typeface for the website.

CSS Organization and Performance
A well-structured HTML document is accessible and satisfies all the basic
requirements for the reader, even without CSS. Text can be zoomed, selected,
copied and shared. Letter size by default is big enough to be comfortably read
at arm’s length and the layout is flexible. So the fallbacks are already present
and we only need to ensure the enhancements we add don’t stand in the way,
especially if the browser is less capable or the connection speed is poor.
That said, the best way to manage responsive typography with CSS
is to handle the micro-typography and the most common defaults in the
main CSS file, while placing all of the breakpoint-specific typography into
separate files.

The main CSS file should contain the default rules for:


  • font stack

  • document hierarchy

  • relative letter sizes for headlines, subheads, captions and side-notes

  • best-guess line height based on the optimal line length

  • maximum widths for content elements


A breakpoint-specific CSS file can contain:


  • different typographic scale values based on information density

  • line height overrides based on increased (or decreased) line length

  • layout-specific rules


49 http://dubrovnikapartmentsvillas.com
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