At 6/22/2009 08:49 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
To put what you wrote another way, with a font family list such as your
example, the visitor is at the designer's mercy to see only the designer's
choice of fonts, instead of the visitor's, even if the visitor has spent big
money on high quality but uncommon fonts and chosen as default one of them.
To actually see his choice, the visitor will have to set is browser to
completely ignore the designer's font choices throughout all documents.
Like Mark, I say let the visitor's choice be the choice applied to most
content, with the designer specifying otherwise only to highlight or provide
character, as in headings, emphasis, or menuing. On body at least, it should
be enough to specify either serif or sans-serif (partial deference to
visitor), or nothing at all (total deference to visitor). If the visitor
wants Comic Sans, let him have it. It's his puter, not yours.
I submit that installing a font on one's computer establishes a
concrete desire to view text styled in that font to be displayed in
that font. Conversely, if we don't wish to see text in a particular
font, we can simply remove it or choose not to install it in the
first place. We're still "at the mercy" of PDFs and word processing
documents with embedded fonts and Flash movies and docs containing
text-as-image, but plain text HTML cannot force fonts on us that we
do not choose to see. The user has complete control over their own
computer in this regard and cannot be forced or coerced by a document designer.
I put it to you that all of the text on a page provides character to
the page, not just headlines & menus. It is the relationship between
different fonts on a page that gives it deeper character. Sans-serif
heads are not the same when paired with either serif or sans-serif body text.
Please explain the boundary you perceive between body text, which you
feel should not be styled by the page designer, and headlines,
emphasis, and menuing which you think are OK for a designer to
design. Why should the page designer not influence the former and why
should the font-sensitive end-user relinquish control over the latter?
Further, why should we not influence letter forms but have our merry
way with foreground & background colors, borders, images, surrounding
margins & padding, line height, and other stylistic memes that can
affect both readability and the reader's aesthetic context just as
much as or more than font choice?
I suggest we go ahead and suggest font-families but do it
intelligently and compassionately, choosing fonts for a particular
purpose for their grace and readability and compatibility with
column-width and all the rest of the page design.
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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