A Complete Guide to Web Design

Internet Explorer 1.0 introduced the proprietaryface="value"attribute to the

<font>tag, which allows you to specify specific fonts for selected text. This

attribute was adopted by Navigator in versions 3.0 and higher (note, it does not

work in Navigator 2.0 or earlier).

The face attribute does not guarantee that the user will see your text in your speci-

fied font. Consider it merely a recommendation. Read “Why Specifying Type is

Problematic” in Chapter 3,Web Design Principles for Print Designers, before glee-

fully sprinkling the<font> tag throughout your documents.

The quote-enclosed value offaceis one or more display font names separated by

commas as follows:

<FONT FACE="Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">block of text</FONT>

The browser looks at the string of font names until it finds one that is installed on

the system and can be used for display. If none of the suggested fonts are

installed, the default font will be used instead.

You can include a generic font family (serif, sans-serif, monospace,

cursive,orfantasy) as the last choice in your list, which allows the browser to

choose any available font within that class should your named fonts not be found.

It’s sort of a last-ditch effort to get something like the font you want, without

leaving it entirely to chance.

<font face> advantages

• Gives designers some influence over font selection.


• Degrades acceptably.If the suggested fonts are not found (or if the tag is not
  supported), the text will simply be displayed in the browser’s default font
  specified by the user.

<font face> disadvantages

• Font specification (and other stylistic control) is better handled by style sheets.
  Because it flagrantly links style information with content, this tag has been
  deprecated by the HTML 4.0 Specification and may be obsolete in future ver-
  sions of HTML.


• Not viable for specifying non-western fonts.uses simple map-
  ping to match identifying character set numbers to character shapes (“glyphs”)
  that may not translate correctly for the font you select.

The original HTML specification included tags for five different types of lists:

numbered lists (called ordered lists), bulleted lists (called unordered lists), defini-

tion lists, menus, and directory lists. Since then, directory lists and menus have

been “deprecated” with the recommendation that unordered lists be used for the

same effect. In this section, we’ll look at the structure of each type of list in current

use.