The term “font face” in HTML can refer to the font tag’s face property or the CSS selector font-face. The font tag’s face property has been depreciated, and the CSS font-family property should be used instead. To mitigate missing font problems, a list of fonts can be used with the face property. CSS also allows for custom fonts to be loaded from the web server.
In HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the term “font face” can mean two things. It can refer to the font tag’s face property, which is used to define the type of font in which the attached text will be displayed. Alternatively, it can also refer to the cascading style sheet (CSS) selector font-face, which allows for a convenient method of embedding custom or rare characters into a website. As of the HTML 4.0 language specification, however, the face property of the font tag has been depreciated, meaning it will still be rendered by a web browser, but a CSS alternative should be used.
The HTML font is used as a property of the font tag itself to specify which font should be used to render the text enclosed within the opening and closing font tags. Any font can be specified this way, although it will only display correctly if the user already has the font with the exact name on their computer. If a user does not have the HTML font named on his local hard drive, the browser will default to a standard font.
This missing font problem can be mitigated in two ways, the first is to use only one of a small set of fonts that come standard with almost all operating systems, ensuring that the font is displayed correctly. The second option is to use a feature of the HTML font property that allows you to list more than one character as a value, separated by commas. Using a list of fonts with the face property will cause the browser to attempt to load each font sequentially, moving on to the next one if the current font fails to load. This provides a more controlled method of designing a web page that can remove completely unexpected results.
When the HTML font property was depreciated, it was replaced with a CSS version. The correct way to specify a font via CSS is to use a style and the font-family property, which works almost identically to the HTML font property. Even if the HTML tag property is depreciated, browsers should still support the feature for backward compatibility reasons.
Via CSS, an HTML font can also refer to a selector that can be used to load custom fonts from the web server so that users can view the page correctly without needing to have the font beforehand. This selector gives designers a way to specify a font file which is then downloaded and displayed on requesting web browsers. Like many CSS elements, however, there are some compatibility issues between different browser implementations.
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