Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY - Sandhills Community College

Web Style Guide: TYPOGRAPHY
The early versions of HTML did not allow designers to specify a typeface for Web documents. With
version 3.2 came several new tags aimed at giving designers more control over the visual properties of
elements, among them the FONT tag. Many of these have been "deprecated" by the World Wide Web
Consortium, which means that they may be dropped from future versions of HTML. Although the added
tags enable designers to create more elegant-looking pages, they also result in cumbersome code that is
difficult to adapt and maintain. You can still use the FONT tag to set the type in your documents, but a
better approach is to consolidate text formatting in style sheets.
You can specify any typeface for your Web pages, but many computers have only the default operating
system fonts installed. If the typeface you specify is not available on the user's computer, the browser
will switch to the default font (generally "Times New Roman" or "Times"). To increase the chances that
the reader will see a typeface you are happy with, you can specify multiple fonts. The browser will
check for the presence of each font (in the order given), so you can specify three or four alternates
before the browser applies the default font, for example, "Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica." As a lastditch
effort you can end your font declaration with a generic font designation such as "sans serif." That
way, if the browser cannot find any of the listed fonts, it will display the text in any available sans serif
font.
P { font-family: "Times New Roman", Georgia, Times, serif }
Notice that multiword fonts like "Times New Roman" must appear within quotation marks.
A good way to make sure that your type settings are functioning correctly is to set your browser's default
proportional font setting to something that is obviously different from your intended font. For example,
set your browser's default font to Courier if you are not using Courier in your document. When you view
your page, anything that appears in Courier must not be marked up properly.
Type size
Setting the size of type is a matter of some controversy. The Web is supposed to be a universal medium
where users of all kinds have equal access to information. As opposed to a printed medium, where the
layout and type are fixed, Web pages should adapt to meet the needs of all comers, so that, for example,
low-vision users can set the type of Web documents to display at a size that they find legible. But these
adjustments can skew a page layout and send the designer, who diligently designed the page around a
specific size of type, into paroxysms. And though variation thwarts the designer who worked to fashion
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