Ace on Tech

CSS property allows downloadable fonts

Oct 07

AceWeb Development & Design Apple, design, web View Comments

clipped from www.simplebits.com Webkit now supports the @font-face CSS property, enabling the designer to specify downloadable fonts in their web pages. The worry that all web pages will be suddently ruined with crappy free fonts everywhere overshadows the fact that some good can come out of the ability to at least have a choice to use those crappy (and/or potential useful) fonts. Give us all a chance, eh? imagine using a downloadble dingbat font for displaying icons instead of GIF or JPEG images. Suddenly text and icons become truly scalable together. Finally a way to make MySpace look even worse (-;

WebKit is the open source browser engine driving many Mac OS X applications like Safari (the browser), Dashboard, Mail, etc., and is a derivative of KDE (familiar to some geeks) technology.

Without wanting to sound ignorant, but I haven’t really kept up with Apple software, so if I’m completely honest, I must admit I wasn’t aware of WebKit and looked it up. That put aside, as the folks at SimpleBits suggest, this property raises excitement amongst the web design addicts. It’s so enticing because as a web designer, you want your creation to strike the users in all glory, fonts-galore included. The latter has always been a problem due to the variety of systems and browsers roaming the Internet and inherently, because of this variety, one webpage can look 10 times different in 10 different setups. To aid this, the @font-face property allows the designer to designate a single font which will automatically be downloaded in case the visitor doesn’t come equipped with it.

While this may sound like utter web developer ecstasy, the Internet could (and more like will) become (even more, if at all possible) contaminated with sickening free fonts/dingbats. Amateur wannabe designers will indeed, as stated in the last remark, be given the opportunity to make MySpace look even worse.