The Issue: The design specifies slightly different fonts for each OS: Lucida Grande for Mac, Tahoma for PC and Arial or Helvetica for Linux. Matthew expressed concern on how to maintain different stylesheets for different OS. The final decision was: + One stylesheet only. + The team agreed to make use of fallbacks in the font declaration. The font faces will go from least common to most common. This should solve the problem. + The final tag would look something like .classname {font: 12pt/14pt Lucida Grande, Tahoma, Arial, Sans Serif} Matthew's main concern were about maintaining different style sheets: If there were more then one universal font, then it would be difficult to keep track of and keep consistent over different browsers and platforms. This also makes it difficult when the designer, developer and the user are not seeing the same thing, specifically spacing, text wrapping etc. Jeremy gave some background on font rendering issues Mac/Windows and the different fonts he's had to deal with. A solution proposed is to do a font fall back on CSS which is not painful and probably acceptable to please both worlds. JohnT commented on a book by Zeldman, that you're basically limited to what the user has installed on their computers when the OS is installed. To code your CSS to provide fallback depending on the OS or you have to have OS/Browser specific stylesheets. There was further discussion about the ordering of font faces in the font declaration. Matthew was concerned about the rendering quality of Tahoma on the Mac. Bobby pointed out that Mac users only have Tahoma if they have MS Office, but it is not a standard font. In any case, Lucida Grande is not available on Windows. -Priscilla |
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