HTML: WEB typography

[Thomas Dowling]

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Barry <tonyb at netinfo.com.au>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sunday, May 24, 1998 10:21 AM
Subject: Re:HTML: WEB typography


>At 5:42 AM 1998/05/24, Shawn J.P. West (BlackSheep) wrote:
>>This is a list of some of the standard fonts that ship with microsoft
>>products. I've found it helpful in my construction efforts.
>
>Why? Many of us choose not to use Microsofts's expensive, huge, slow and
>insecure products.
>
>Avoid anything which is platform or vendor specific.
>


Tony--

You did actually look at these pages before firing off this post, right?
And noticed the lists of Macintosh system fonts, XFree and X11 fonts,
GhostScript fonts, and Adobe Type Manager fonts, right?  What else would you
like this site to provide?

As has been noted several times, it does no good to specify fonts if they
don't exist on the user's machine (even given decent font-embedding
schemes).  However, many users--for good or bad, by choice or by
organizational policy--use Microsoft operating systems and/or office
applications.  For those web authors who do want to suggest font names, the
pages cited allow for informed guesswork.

[Farther down the thread...]

>It's good design to try and make your content intelligible to as many of
>your readers as you can. With FACE you therefore want to provide
>alternatives for Windows, MacOS and Unix.

It seems like this shouldn't be necessary.  I sure wish that my browser had
access to a registry of font names that could reliably find analogs on my
system.  For instance, I have three versions of Palatino, none of which is
actually called Palatino (one of my versions was actually created by the
original designer, Hermann Zapf, so I assume it's a pretty good rendition).
It would be a boon to cross-platform writing if you, as an author, could
specify "font-family: Palatino" any my browser, not finding that font name,
could consult a table and come up with either Zapf Calligraphic or Book
Antiqua as alternatives.  Hmm, idle thoughts on an idle day (it's a holiday
here in the States).

>...Within a fairly short time we can expect some viewing to be done on
>the equivalent of mobile phones which will have an interesting bearing on
>this.

I've already spotted a few hits from a Nokia browser on our system.  To me,
this is another strong indicator that we need to get layout kludges out of
HTML, and get browser support for alternate stylesheets.  This would be
simply handled in CSS by an "@media handheld" rule.

General caveat: there's much more to page design and to typography than font
selection.  This is the tip of the iceberg.

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu