Re: [CSS21] @font-face question

On Tuesday, May 4, 2004, 1:06:15 PM, Adam wrote:



AB> Hallo!
AB> "@font-face" was in CSS2 and is not in CSS21. How then can I use font from
AB> my own font file using CSS21 and HTML 4.01.

Using CSS2.1 and HTML 4.01, you cannot, no.

Using existing CSS plus HTML browsers, this only works on MS IE, and
only on the Windows platform, and only using one particular font
format (Weft) which has IPR restrictions and cannot be freely
implemented without royalty.

Netscape 4.x had a type of downloadable font support (using a link
tag, and not using CSS) and this was going to be upgraded to use
@font-face, but this never happened.  The Netscape pre-implementation
used a different font format, PFR, which could also not be freely
implemented. The authoring tool that made these fonts was fairly
expensive as I recall.

On the other hand, an @font-face merely makes additional font choices
available to implementations that understand it; it is ignored (by the
forward compatible parsing rules) by other implementations and CSS
always specifies the font with a list, not a single value.

So other implementations are no worse off and merely fail to find your
first choice font and go on to the next one.

AB> Or is there a way using
AB> something other, perhaps DHTML or JavaScript?
AB> Adam Badura (abadura@o2.pl)

Not really.

Are you using downloadable fonts for a particular artistic effect, or
are you using them to get support for a particular language?

-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 15:06:47 UTC