Re: Font streaming - good or bad?

> I have a client that wants to use images to make the text look good on
= a Web page (because it is anti-aliased and that makes the text clearer)

Modern browsers and modern OSes will anti-alias the fonts, if you 
turn on the option (apparently it can sometimes make things worse)
themselves.

= but this causes enormous problems that I don't need to mention here.
> 
> A workaround for this would be the use of font streaming to control
= the look of the text. However, although I cannot see that this would

What's font streaming?  CSS provides a framework for font downloading,
but doesn't specify the font encoding technology.  Problems are:

- I don't think grayscale fonts are allowed, so you can't anti-alias
  without an anti-aliasing font engine!
- there are two standards (roughly IE and NS4, although I think the
  situation is more confused and NS6 doesn't support the NS4 format
  and may not support the IE one;
- any font delivery mechanism has to meet the copyright protection
  demands of the font foundries - this means some fonts can't be
  downloaded and, for the other fonts, the font delivery mechanism locks
  you into viewing the page from one site, so you can't locally mirror.

= pose any accessibility problems per se, does anyone have any previous
= experience of font streaming and accessibility?

[ single line paragraphs repaired ]

Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 18:48:03 UTC