James,
You've touched on an issue alluded to here in the recent past... that of font embedding. It would solve a lot of these disputes!
A good half way house may be to find a standard-install PC font (and quite a few come with the OS or with Office) that resembles the one the print designer specifies, find a similar one for the Mac and put that second in the list, then fall back on the usual suspects. I guess you'd be lucky to find exact matches, but you might get close! You would have to admit that people with, say, earlier OSs may see a more prosaic font instead, but argue the merits anyway.
The glorious vision of web standards does not easily win over those used to being able to draw on a vast store of fonts and absolute page positioning. They and the client need to see the benefits (eg higher and better ranking in search engines, faster downloads for customers, less server load).
I have considered the idea - in fact it is one of my big 'problems' with
this site. There is a commercial imperative to stick to the original
font for the major site areas (those tabs will actually be changed soon)
- the print designer is quite adamant about it.
The css navigation bar detailed in alistapart seems to work in everything except Safari 1.0 and Mac IE 5. A shame! So if the client wants js rollovers, you gotta do what you gotta do. Maybe in a few years' time they can be stripped out and replaced with CSS versions. Sigh!
But the big issue I have is the use of images in the navigation bar -
there will be JS rollovers added to the code as the client wants the
rollover effect. I have used CSS rollovers but they seem to break or
give bad performance in too many 'commercial' browsers to make the jump.
I really want to push the semantics and accessibility further but there is the commercial reality of the client. How do others feel about these issues - particularly with regard the CSS rollovers.
-Hugh Todd
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