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Kevin Potts

"Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites"

2, 2001 (psychology.wichita.edu/
surl/usabilitynews/3S/font.htm).
familiarity and proven legibility, make them ideal carriers of web-based content. The trick,
then, is to make sure the CSS references them correctly.
Cascading style sheets provide web designers the means to discontinue the use of messy
inline tags and other display-related markup. In addition to creating far cleaner
HTML, CSS allows for advanced typographic control, such as general styling (italicizing and
bolding), employing small caps and drop caps, precise sizing through different units of
measurement, and much more.5 With this much power, it is vital to write CSS type definitions
that accommodate different platforms.
For instance, all Windows-based and newer Mac-based machines have Arial installed, but
the same cannot be said for older Mac-based computers, which often rely on the similar
but subtly different Helvetica.6 To produce a similar experience on both operating systems,
the CSS needs to define both faces, such as the following:
p {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
It is also important to note that some fonts may not be called the same thing between OSs,
and ones that are may look slightly different between the platforms.


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