Eh, What?

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Just got to work and looked at the site.  Very unexpected…. I set the header font family to fantasy; sans-serif; papayrus  (I think… might have deleted the family–it didn’t do anything).  That looked right on my home system, using Firefox.  But here, using IE, the font looks like a gothic serif.  WTF?  Is it the browser, or is it the fonts installed on my work PC? 

Great oogily moogilies!  That’s what I hate about dealing with non-standard fonts, but I’m sick of Arial….

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3 Responses to Eh, What?

  1. Dr.Heinous says:
    September 29, 2006 at 10:59 am

    Well, it depends on the font installed on your system. The HTML basically suggests a font; your system responds with whatever it thinks matches most closely.

    That’s one of the downsides of HTML/CSS. You can’t actually specify a particular font and be sure that is what the view sees (which is why so many times you’ll see an image rather than text; obviously this is only good for static text).

    Generally you can only rely on the core fonts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

    CSS2 may change this in the future, however.

  2. Ubu Roi says:
    September 29, 2006 at 11:27 am

    Kind of what I figured. But I’m still working out css1, how can they change on me? Arrgh. I feel Shamus’ pain…

    Colleges are great at taking an established body of knowledge and distilling it into courses and curriculum. This works well as long as the body of knowledge isn’t changing too fast. CS changes at a shocking pace, and it’s hard for educators to keep up. Heck, it’s hard for those of us working in the field to keep up. How much harder is it for teachers who are trying to teach what they know, instead of fighting to learn new things!

    This was one of the things that I ran up against when I was trying to change careers to IT. Every time I’d start learning a language or software package, it was out of date before I could get proficient with it.

  3. Dr.Heinous says:
    October 13, 2006 at 2:34 pm

    Here, here is more info on browsers and fonts and whatnot: http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/res_fonts.htm

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