[sllug-members]: Developing websites for *today's* masses

[Michael Heath]

First, lets be clear. HTML is a format for adding markup and metainfo to
text, and a syntax for establishing relationships between that text and text
elsewhere (links). HTML has no other purpose; it has nothing to do with
Fonts, or what browser your using, or how it's displaying the pages, or
colors, or tables, or anything else you're thinking of. That is not the job
of modern HTML; use of it in such a way is a gross missuse.

Instead, your pages content should be in pure, clean HTML or XHTML. If you
want to outline the way a particular browser renders your page, that should
be done in CSS. Making nasty browser-specific parts to your HTML is bad.

What your looking for is the font family part of CSS. You shouldn't confine
a pages rendering to specific fonts; instead, choose an appropriate font
family. Theres lots of guidance and documentation about good values for this
out on the net.

Bad web development bugs me. HTML is such a cool spec, and powerful for
marking up and making data useful, and modern web development destroys this.
Instead of a format for making data more useful via metainfo, it's become
essentially an image format: developers design it with the goal of exactly
the same image being displayed to everyone.

Mike Heath

On Dec 13, 2007 4:55 PM, Chad <masterclc at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> <Soapbox>
> There seems to be a lot of information on how to program a website
> that anyone can use, regardless of their desire to still surf with <a
> href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html">Nexus</a>.
>  I'm not saying it's wrong to make that decision (ok I am) but I think
> that developing for obsoleted browsers is a big hindrance to
> progression with web design (outside of a *gasp* *cough* *choke* Flash
> driven website).  Specifically the point I am interested in is Font
> usage.  I realize some small devices (a Motorolla RAZR for example)
> need an alternate interface, so I'm not directing this towards that
> side of web development; I think those websites need an alternate
> design anyway (based on browser identification or something similar).
> I'm talking about your typical everyday website that you are going to
> hit up from your desk at home or work, with a 19 - 24 inch LCD monitor
> using Firefox, Safari, IE 6/7 or something newer.
> </Soapbox>
>
> <Question>
> Is there some information on what fonts exist on modern operating
> systems that allow a web designer to take better advantage of todays
> fonts and begin rendering websites using these "highly advanced" fonts
> with a possible fall back to Arial or Verdana, so as to not exclude
> the folks who refuse to give up their days of ol'?  I know I can just
> randomly pick the font I like and check for myself, but I'd prefer a
> nice organized tabled (ok, maybe in pure CSS :D) list of fonts that
> are common to multiple modern operating systems.  Does anyone know of
> such a beast?
> </Question>
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Chad
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