used not because they looked good, or were easy to read, but because they
solved a technological problem. Monospaced font allot the same width to
each character, even when it’s senseless to do so. In other words, the iis as
wide as the w. So you have a wad of white space on either side of the i, and
other letters have varying amounts of too much or too little room between
them.
Why then was monospace so widely used? Most typewriters could not
manage proportional (varying) character widths, and some display devices
had a similar problem. These issues died along with the typewriter. Computer
output devices — printers and monitors — can quite easily handle variations
in character width. So just ignore monospaced character fonts. Their day is
done, with a single exception: Monospaced fonts like thisare sometimes
used in books and browsers to indicate computer language code. Try the
tag in HTML to see it.
Using system styles .............................................................................
Windows offers a variety of typefaces for its various components. If you want
to use elements in your Web pages that look like the Windows fonts (or some
other operating system that’s hosting the browser), you can use system fonts.
The available fonts are caption, icon, menu, message-box, small-caption (for
captions on tiny components), and status-bar. Here’s an example you can load
into Internet Explorer to see these font effects:
<html>
<head><style>button {font: caption;}
icon {font: icon;}
menu {font: menu;}</style>
</head>
<body><button>
This is a caption on a button
</button><br>
<icon>
ICON FONT