Typography on the Interwebs

From the times of just using...Times New Roman (yes the font that is used in this entire blog), or going with the stylish Georgia, or maybe you just want to go with a nice clean Trebuchet. Either way these fonts have been around on your system for years and have been name "Web safe" fonts. What "Web safe" means for you is they'll appear the same on any website on any computer...anywhere... In the past this was fine and dandy with some, but others wanted to push the bar a bit. With CSS2 they added in the ability to host certain fonts with the @font-face rule. The @font-face rule allowed you to host via your web hosting a font that was not normally known as a system font. The problem arose when vendors who would sell fonts realized that in hosting the font, one could simply view the source of a site using the @font-face rule and snag the unique font being hosted there. This opened up the door for piracy of the font kind. This @font-face rule was removed in CSS2.1. It was later added back in with the emergence of free fonts that could be hosted as well as services like Typekit.com which would host the fonts for you and encrypt the rule in your CSS so no one could pirate it. There are a few other providers of free fonts like Google Web Fonts or Fontsquirrel.com. By around 1999 / 2000 the @font-face rule became a known standard to most web designers. In my personal opinion, I believe the ability to host your own fonts is not only here to stay, but it will become more prominent as more and more people make the move to a web based society. So brush off your...brushes...dip that quill in that ink, and turn on that creative part of your brain, design a font, and be ready to host it for the world to see!