CSS Type Excitedness

October 15, 2007

This summer, it was mentioned, discussed, and even written about that web desginers would soon be able to have CSS font support using the @font-face property. After reading Dan Cederholm's post, I figured I'd be just another person writing about this — because I'm freakin' excited about the possibilities.

Can you imagine the day when we're not limited to just M$'s ugly Arial font, Tahoma, and Helvetica for sans-serifs and Georgia and Times for serifs?! I agree somewhat with Stephen Coles' statement about the possible danger in allowing web designers to have typographical control, but I think Dan offers a brilliant counter reason for the importance of this future CSS support. The web has alway been an open field for anyone to publish anything they feel like posting. While this can condone, in a way, a large amount of junk, bad taste, and falsities floating around; the same goes for the open possibility of utter genius-ness that was never so easily accessible. The web is about accessibility. Crap or not. I guess this just means that in order for people to have a chance, like Dan says, we need to allow the possibility of people ruining typography. But, who said the current type on the web was all that brilliant anyway?! I mean, take the widely supported Comic Sans and all its wrongly deserved glory for example! And, unfortunately, web desginers already have control over many of the traditions held so dear by typographers like line-height, leading, and relative font sizes. These get ruined all the time! I'm probably not the best typographer, myself, anyway, but I'm glad I get to take a stab at it.

So far, it seems that Safari's WebKit is the only one taking the initiative to push for this support. And I assume Firefox will be on its way shortly. But don't hold your breath for Internet Explorer, they're always a decade late.

If you'd like more info on how this works with CSS, check out the article posted on A List Apart — CSS @ Ten: The next Big Thing.

CSS Type Excitedness

October 15, 2007

Mark Caron

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