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In the CSS community...

CSS is ten years old this year. Such an anniversary is an opportunity to revisit the past and chart the future. CSS has fundamentally changed web design by separating style from structure. It has provided designers with a set of properties that can be tweaked to make marked-up pages look right—and CSS3 proposes additional properties requested by designers.

Many CSS properties, both old and new, deal with text: they describe text color, position, style, and direction. This is all very good—after all, text fills most of our screens. But in order for properties to reach their full potential, we need a good selection of fonts. And fonts are sorely missing from the web.

Consider the fine designs in the What makes them so exciting to look at? In part, it is the variety of fonts. Fonts convey design messages and create effect, and while in traditional print design there are a plethora of fonts available, fonts have been in limited supply on the web. Web designers depend on ten or so universally available fonts for their designs, and are reduced in large part to using Verdana and Arial over and over again. A typical CSS Zen Garden design, on the other hand, uses a hand-picked font to render text and aligns the glyphs to a pixel-perfect degree...and then uses that text as a background image.

A background image!

There are many reasons why background images should not be used to convey text. Images are expensive to transmit and hard to make. Imagine trying to translate a web page into 15 languages and having to produce a set of images for each language. Additionally, the quality of printed web pages suffers as images don’t scale to the resolutions offered by modern printers. Using background images is currently the only way designers can use their favorite fonts on the web. But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?

There is a way: web fonts. Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.

A brief history of web fonts

This is not a new idea. In 1998, CSS2 described a way to link to fonts from style sheets, and both Microsoft and Netscape added support for web fonts in their browsers. However, neither vendor supported the most widely used font format. Instead, they each picked a different, little-used format with few tools to support it (EOT and TrueDoc, respectively). And so web fonts disappeared from the designer’s toolbox.

web design, web development & video

Better news
It’s a pleasure for me to announce that web fonts are back! Here are some recently generated examples that show how a familiar document can be rendered when TrueType web fonts are available.

How do you pick the sites?

Well first they have to be done in CSS. Tables can only be used for tabular data. Second they just have to look good to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so I do not expect every site that is posted to be liked by everyone or even anyone. Also do not expect a site to be posted just because you sent it in. * With the large amount of submissions I get daily and the increasing number of showcase sites, getting your site into the Vault will now be more challenging. I look for use of color, typography, whitespace, IA and how they all fit overall in the site's structure.

Can I submit any site that I think is good?

Sure you can. It just doesn't have to be your site, it can be any site on the web that you think is useful. If you submit a link and it gets put up on the Vault, I will make sure to give you "props" in the entry.

Do the sites have to validate?

Most of these are commercial sites so I will leave it up to you to answer that question.
[ click here to validate: W3C-Validator ]

Comment Guidelines

Generic “this is nice” or “this is crap” will be deemed unuseful to the discussion and deleted. I am not setting up a communist site, but one that allows for quality discussion on the design merits of the site. If their is something about the design you do not like, feel free to express your opinion, but please provide justification so that everyone may benefit. Same thing goes for if you have something nice to say.

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