- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:23:30 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Nicholas Shanks wrote: > > I have a website which discusses typography, web design, and computer > fonts. It recently occurred to me that my use of spans with style > elements was not really the most semantic method of getting across my > meaning, and I would be better using the font element. > > My content goes something like this: > > <span style="font-family:Helvetica">This is a sample of Helvetica</span><br> > <span style="font-family:Arial">This is a sample of Arial</span> > > Which loses its visual meaning if the CSS is stripped, overridden, or > not understood, and further more I cannot supply fallback fonts (since > that would create a misleading visual appearance) and so here contradict > the CSS guidelines for the font-family property. Would it not be more > correct to use: > > <font face="Helvetica">This is a sample of Helvetica</font><br> > <font face="Arial">This is a sample of Arial</font> > > In this instance I am saying to the browser that the font is the > critical part of that run of text, and the fact that <font> doesn't > support fall-back works in my favour here, as well as the usage being > fully compatible with graphical UAs. I would argue that HTML is the wrong language for what you're trying to do. What you're conveying is intrinsically visual (media-specific) and you should use a media-specific format, like PDF. Indeed, this point was then put forward by a number of people: On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Brady J. Frey wrote: > [...] On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, David Walbert wrote: > [...] On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, gary turner wrote: > [...] On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Bill Mason wrote: > [...] On Thu, 12 Apr 2007, Dave Singer wrote: > [...] HTH, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 14:23:30 UTC