The completion of the next implementation of ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, CSS3, by the World Wide Web Consortium is something I, and many people in our field are eagerly looking forward to. ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ or CSS as they are commonly referred to be were introduced to handle the presentation logic in HTML page. CSS3 new features allow it to take over more presentation logic such transition, movement as well expanding many of features of the current CSS2.1. In this entry I would like to focus on one very important feature, ‘Web Fonts’.

‘Web Fonts’, are not exactly a new idea, supported for them started in CSS2 and Internet Explorer 5.5 but both implementation relied on the proprietary Embedded Open Type format that saw little support from many browsers. CSS3’s ‘Web Font’ supports any licensed TrueType and OpenType font for easy use of multiple font-faces. Implementation is as easy as declaring a font using ‘@font-face’, specifying its font-family or name and linking to the source file. Since the files are stored at a web server they are always available to any visitor. This is a very exciting feature for designers and other creative people because in many cases it could do away with the practice of using images for exotic fonts that are not supported by HTML, browsers and operating systems.

Although CSS3 is not finalized many current browsers have included support for many of its new features for quite some time. The latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Opera support features such ‘Web Fonts’, new border rendering and styles, and text effects. However, at the moment only Safari 4.0 and above have the most complete and robust support for the CSS3 specifications. In future post I will be discussing some of the other features in CSS3 so look forward to learning about Alpha and Opacity.  :-)