If you have designed / developed your own site, or have designed / developed sites for others, sooner or later you came across the small fact that many people only use three different types of fonts on the web including “Arial”, “Verdana” and “Times”. Beauty of the web is about having many operating systems and browsers and interfaces come together for standard plat for on web. Since there are so many variations of connecting to web majority of them have only few things in common. Fonts being the least of those things.
As a designer or a person who demand average visuals, its hard to have a jazzy web site with only three generic fonts. Come on … lets face it, you can do only so much with bolding and italicizing.
Granted CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allow for a better layout. Which may help with the font solution but it doesn’t solve the issue completely. I suppose if you really needed some advance fonts you can create straps using image.
But this is not optimal since you are creating images of text which is bad, think about it, images of text, shouldn’t text be text? Plus this makes it not reusable as well as adds extra download on the web site. Some may argue that now average surfing speed it getting higher and higher and images should not be a problem, but I don’t necessarily share the same thoughts. I agree that there should be more entertaining images, but just having the image of a text just simply pisses me off.
If you are like me and are upset at this paradigm then be upset no more, because there is a solution. Its called “Sifer” or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. mikeindustries.com/sifr In essence it’s a tool kit / API for including pretty fonts (see example). How does it work you may ask? Well it’s a pretty simple solution. It works on the few basic principles. First having the fonts be embedded in a flash file, then using a small javascript API (from their site). API removes existing pure text with the flash file and call ActionScript (flash script) change the font size and the text inside the flash file to match what the user specified in the style. I can only hope this makes web community realize the importance of visuals and we have more support from browsers then just a flash hack.
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