[OpenFontLibrary] What's the big deal about @font-face anyway?

[Liam R E Quin]

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 10:30 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
[...]
> What I don't understand is, why is it a good idea to let website designers 
> choose what font *I* read their text with?  It's a basic usability question.

It's a balance.  Like Flash™, on the one foot it allows people to experiment
with new user interface ideas, and lets anyone be a user interface
designer, and, on the other foot, it forces everyone to be a user interface
designer.

So yes, we'll no doubt see some 1994-style geocities Web pages with 30 fonts
on them, all blinking and in different colours, just as when Pagemaker was
released. And on the other hand, after the disturbance has died down and
there's some collective wisdom, we'll see some really good designs.

Of course, there are also i18n reasons to supply a font -- if you're
writing in a script that has poor support on major platforms, you no
longer have to decide between text-in-images or telling people to
install a font.

Now, just wait until you discover that Mozilla and Safari/Webkit have
implemented CSS transforms, so that you can stretch and distort your
text too!

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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