have to replace their corporate typeface by standard fonts such as Arial,
making a consistent corporate identity throughout all media impossible.
@font-face already existed at the end of the 1990s
The possibility of embedding any given font into a Web site has been
around for a while. Netscape 4 as well as Internet Explorer 4 − which was
the first browser to support the @font-face rule by the way − already
supported @font-face end of the 1990s allowing the ability to deposit fonts
on the server and deliver them through the web page.
1 @font-face {
2 font-family: Gentium;
3 src: url(fonts/gentium.eot);
4 }However, this technique was ahead of its time. Font rendering used to
employ simple grayscale anti-aliasing at that time. This was no problem for
system fonts, which were laboriously optimized for rendering on screen, but
other fonts were not rendered properly as they lacked the benefits of the
manual on-screen optimization. Instead of improving web typography, the
use of non-system fonts made Web sites even worse.
No wonder that the @font-face rule was removed in the CSS 2.1
specification. The use of system fonts remained the general practice in web
design, especially for copy. For headlines, several work-arounds have been
established, for example replacing the actual text by a bitmap file or a flash
movie displaying the headline in a particular font. These flash movies
themselves may utilize font embedding.