Every so often, when my brain has a moment to sit idly, I like to check in with the W3C and see what’s happening with the new standards.  Once I stopped drooling over <video> tags, I started looking into the CSS3 proposal for the @font-face rule, and started getting excited.

If you’re not sure why this is cool, lemme ‘splain.  When your web browser opens a page, it can only use the fonts that are installed on your computer to display the text it contains.  When designing a page, web designers are largely limited to web-safe fonts — fonts that are installed on (more or less) every computer.

We can specify alternates.  We can tell the browser to use Helvetica, but Verdana’s okay if Helvetica’s not installed.  No Verdana?  Use Arial, or any sans-serif font.  By the time it gets to the end of the list, we’re pretty much willing to take anything, just so long as you can read it.

In cases where we really, really want you to see the page just how we envisioned it, we can link the font on the main page so you can download and install it… but will you?  Sounds like a lot of work…

If we really insist, we can make a graphic of whatever text we simply must have displayed in Haettenschweiler, and have the page display that; but that’s a lot of work for us, and it makes pages a pain to update.

With @font-face, our worries are over.  We install the font on the server hosting the page, and your browser loads the text looking exactly how it was designed.  It’s still a working draft — they have to set it so that fonts will only be available for the page for which they’re intended, lest everyone be able to snatch pay-to-use fonts from the web with abandon… but I’m excited to start playing with it.

Want to have more reasons to dislike Internet Explorer?  Trip on over to When Can I Use to see how little interest Microsoft apparently has in supporting new features.  Why, exactly, is IE6 still alive?