Safe Fonts

[LeeH]

Hi,

Are the fonts Tahoma and Verdana safe fonts to use while programming web pages?

Do most browsers support them.

Thanks,

Lee

[PaulKroll]

The question is do most users have the fonts. The answer is "maybe". You should always supply a list of fonts, starting with the most-preferred, for any specific font style.

[Justin]

Under Linux, I often run accross sites with Windows-specific fonts, and I end up seeing my default font. It really depends on what applications are installed. I personally have all of the basic Adobe fonts, but your basic Verdana and other MS-specific fonts aren't there.

Use CSS, and avoid <FONT> tags. In your CSS, as Paul suggests, list more than one font:

body {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;}

This last entry is a generic family, so if the user doesn't have Verdana or Arial, it will use the default sans-serif font, keeping at least that aspect of it. Same goes for serif and fixed-width fonts (though Courier is pretty much available everywhere).

Only problem with CSS is Netscape 4.x users... which (sorry Bob) are growing few and far between ;)

[Deb]

Only problem with CSS is Netscape 4.x users... which (sorry Bob) are growing few and far between Wow! It didn't take you long at all to get back to your old self!

Deb
- I've got enough corners for everyone to sit in so watch yourselves :P

[Bob]

Ok Ok, I had to jump in with some defense of my beloved Netscape

For a short history for those relatively new to these "discussions" I absolutely Love Netscape.

However I am honest enough to admit I cried :QTcry: the day I heard that AOL had taken over Netscape because if there is anything that I feel more strongly about than Microsoft is AOL. Microsoft is a monopoly while AOL, well lets say, IMHO is a close to being a Thug as you may find in a provider!

So the history aside, I still prefer using Netscape 4x series, currently 4.78 for me. Quite honestly it crashes less for me than IE and when it does crash it's a much faster recovery than IE. It's like preferring the old Dodge, reliable and stable, over the sleeker New Import. and yes I could be considered relatively Old among the staff at FutureQuest

Now as I mentioned I am honest enough to admit short comings in NS and I see a bunch in NS 6.1, if you are going in that direction get Mozilla. But the lack of CSS hover color support is not one of them as I find mouseing over a link, which my computer does let me know that it's a link all by itself, and getting some bright yellow or pink highlighting going on just does not appeal to me.

And I wonder what these effects have on a Mac user with the fonts, as I have been told that many of the fonts available to Windows users are not available to a Mac user and I do have to wonder what they may be seeing? Trying to get my post back on thread :)

As always in these types of posts, Just my two cents :P
-Bob

[Deb]

Originally posted by Bob:
and yes I could be considered relatively Old among the staff at FutureQuest Well at least he got one thing correct in this thread.

Deb
- :QTcool:

[Justin]

LOL @ Deb :)

About Mac fonts, it's going to be a similar situation as Linux. Windows-specific fonts won't be there, and even some fonts that happen to come with windows might not. On my system, I have both Verdana and Arial, only because they came with some Adobe font pack (though I don't have any adobe software that I'm aware of... hm...)

Probably you'll run into this situation more with Mac users than Linux users. We Linux users are used to being left out, as there aren't as many of us. We figure, if it doesn't work in Linux, you don't want us visiting your site very badly :P

As for Netscape 4.x and CSS, the problem isn't link hover color. The biggest problem I know of is when you close two nested tables, you suddenly lose any CSS font specifications. And fonts for the "body" don't carry into a "td", even though it's supposed to Cascade (hence the name).

Netscape 6 is garbage IMO, and I'm really not sure why anyone would use it. They took a snapshot of Mozilla, and -- what did they even add to it? No matter what it's out of date compared to Moz.

Moz works with all the NS plugins (I just installed Java and Flash today), so I don't see the extra value of NS6 other than the brand name...

Anyway, that'll be enough Netscape bashing out of me for one night :)

[PaulKroll]

Quite honestly it crashes less for me than IE
OK, well, that's weird. I've never heard anyone say NS 4.7x was more stable than IE, even amongst other Linux fans who are forced to use IE at work. Usually I only hear folks mention "Netscape 4.7" and "Stable" in connection with the words "...as mercury fulminate taped to a Harley."

Not to co-opt the thread TOO much... but while AOL buying Netscape was a strange end to what once looked to be the Next Competitor to Microsoft, AOL buying/merging with Time/Warner was positively disturbing.

Well at least he got one thing correct in this thread.
He was right about pretty much everything in that first message, Bob's love of "Classic Netscape" notwithstanding. :)

I vote that we give Justin a LITTLE bit of a break from the "return ribbing" as I'm sure he's getting to the "Make it stop! Just Stop! Make it stop!" stage. OK, anyway, >I<'m getting to that stage. Please stop! Make it stop! %)

[Harley]

Hi Everyone!

Originally posted by Justin:
About Mac fonts, it's going to be a similar situation as Linux. Windows-specific fonts won't be there, and even some fonts that happen to come with windows might not.

Since around 1996 Internet Explorer has been the default browser installed on "out of the box" Macs. The IE package comes with a bunch of Windows specific fonts, like Arial, Comic Sans MS, Verdana, Times New Roman and a few others, but not Tahoma and a few others.

Originally posted by Justin:
We Linux users are used to being left out,

Hey, us Mac users have been feeling left out before Linux even existed!
:P

Originally posted by Justin:
As for Netscape 4.x and CSS, the problem isn't link hover color. The biggest problem I know of is when you close two nested tables, you suddenly lose any CSS font specifications. And fonts for the "body" don't carry into a "td", even though it's supposed to Cascade (hence the name).

You can get around this by putting all your text in "p" tags.

Regards!

Harley

Edit: punctuation...

[Justin]

I vote that we give Justin a LITTLE bit of a break from the "return ribbing" as I'm sure he's getting to the "Make it stop! Just Stop! Make it stop!" stage. OK, anyway, >I<'m getting to that stage. Please stop! Make it stop!
Nah, not yet. I'd been around quite a while before, and I'd done a lot of stupid things, so I'm really quite used to taking a ribbing now and again. Some of it was public, most of it private. Every yellow smiley I see reminds me of one case certain people will NEVER let me forget :)

I did kinda forget about IE on the Mac; do a lot of people actually use that? I would have thought Mac users were as anti-MS as Linux users (if not more so)... though I admit, before Mozilla started getting its act together, I did almost wish for a Linux IE... but those days are over :)

BTW, Mozilla 0.9.5 is out and I like it. It has a new "tabbed browsing" feature I'm starting to like, and it installed in a snap. I don't believe Mozilla has crashed on me since 0.9.2, and this is my primary browser now (though I can't speak about the Windows version).

About <P> tags -- I hate those as much as I hate <FONT>... I'm not a web designer, but CSS makes much more sense. As for paragraphing and line breaks, <BR> makes more sense, since it is predictable. <P> never made any sense to me at all, and seems to work differently in different browsers.

Regarding TW/AOL, it does seem that this killed Netscape. 6.x was released only because they had to do *something*. I still don't know what they did, aside from snag a copy of Mozilla, s/Mozilla/Netscape/, and bundle AIM/Real Player/Other Useless Stuff with it... doesn't seem any real effort went into it on the part of AOL... seems this happens with everything they buy (WinAmp, ICQ....)

[Justin]

(though I can't speak about the Windows version)
And after a quick and painless install, I can speak for this version as well. Very nice :)

Unfortunately it's faster on Windows for me, though this is a much more powerful system than my always-low-on-memory notebook...

Of course I seem to have hijacked this thread into a browser-war rather than being about fonts... which goes to show I'm still the same Justin. I will however refrain from talking about sound cards this time :)

[janderk]

Originally posted by Justin:
BTW, Mozilla 0.9.5 is out and I like it. It has a new "tabbed browsing" feature I'm starting to like, and it installed in a snap. I don't believe Mozilla has crashed on me since 0.9.2, and this is my primary browser now (though I can't speak about the Windows version)
I'm using Mozilla since a month or so on Windows and it is very good. The new tabbed look in the 0.9.5 version is way cool and prevents a lot of multi window clutter.

Mozilla also allows to kill popups on page load and unload events while leaving alone the normal popups. Thus taking care of a huge amount of irritating advertisement popups. These last two features in combination with the fact that it does not automatically load virusses are for me enough reason to prefer it above IE.

The only thing I don't like and disable is the quickstart feature which only hides Mozilla when you close it. To make it startup faster. The problem is that it still takes up 10's of MB of memory.

Highly recommended,

Jan Derk

[Harley]

Originally posted by Justin:

I did kinda forget about IE on the Mac; do a lot of people actually use that?

I think most Mac users use IE ... the newbies use it because it's the default browser, the power users use it because it's one of the better browsers* (if not the best browser) for the Mac, only the most masochistic use N4 (i don't mean to offend anyone ;)) and almost nobody uses N6.

* With regards to CSS handling, standards complience, etc., it was, until recently, arguably one of the better browsers on any platform.

Originally posted by Justin:

About <P> tags -- I hate those as much as I hate <FONT>... I'm not a web designer, but CSS makes much more sense. As for paragraphing and line breaks, <BR> makes more sense, since it is predictable. <P> never made any sense to me at all, and seems to work differently in different browsers.

I used to be dead set against <p> tags too until very recently. I've warmed up to them since beginning to learn CSS. And <p> tags start to make a whole lot of sense once you start getting away from using tables for layout, standards compliant pages, separating structure from content, etc., etc.

Regards!

Harley
The person formerly known as a Netscape user...

[Justin]

Shows what I know about Macs... I never knew IE was the default browser on a Mac... Hm, but what about OS-X? Have they ported IE to that already?

I would think anyway that Mozilla (even being Beta as it is) would be a better choice on the Mac and/or OS-X, but I can't really say that having not used a Mac since about 1985... but in any case, unless IE on the Mac is far more standards comliant than on Windows, my vote would be Mozilla at least on that note.

To me, <BR> == \n. <P> depends on where you're at, what you're doing, whether or not you have closed your previous <P>... it just seems to sometimes mean \n and other times \n\n. I want my HTML to translate to a specific action, regardless of context (to an extent anyway). <P> always involves trial and error, <BR> means <BR> and that's it.

And I have used CSS for the last 2 years, when I ditched <FONT>. I do however still prefer tables for alignment...

But I'm not a web designer. I do design scripts and web-enabled applications, and for that I need to be able to make a page look the way I want without a lot of mess. Generally I can whip up my idea of HTML and I already know what it will look like in any browser. Generally :)

[dank]

<P> always involves trial and error, <BR> means <BR> and that's it.
Not necessarily. <P> is good for formatting text, thus the 'paragraph' tag nomenclature. A double <BR> will accomplish the same thing, but with no advantage and a slightly less clean code look. Where <BR> doesn't always mean <BR> is when it follows something like an image that already uses the available table width, in which case the first <BR> is likely to do nothing (the image already forces anything following it to the next line). I believe a <P> in that case would always insert a blank line(s), although it seems that would be a sloppy control of the display.

So, I'm basically saying nothing other than that <BR> doesn't always result in a blank line. Not exactly important, but then again, I can't believe a discussion on the pros and cons of <P> and <BR> has gone on this long already. :P

Dan

[Harley]

Originally posted by Justin:
Hm, but what about OS-X? Have they ported IE to that already? Yes, IE5 beta was on the installation disk for OS X Public Beta. Now IE5 (non-beta) for OS X Final is out, as well as Omniweb, iCab, Opera, N6, and maybe others (and I'm not sure if any of those mentioned are still beta).

I haven't played with OS X at all, nor Mozilla, so I can't really say how well they might work together.

BTW, in the <p> vs. <br> department, I posted under the assumption that <p> is always closed with </p>.

Regards!

Harley

[Justin]

So, I'm basically saying nothing other than that <BR> doesn't always result in a blank line.
Not to nit-pic, but I guess it's the programmer in me speaking.

<BR> does always mean \n -- where \n is a line feed.

If you place a line feed while already at the end of a line, it effectively does nothing; the same can be said for the <BR> after an image which already takes all available room...

So for me, if I'm writing a console application or a web page, <BR> == \n :) I just can't work with <P> tags especially as output from a script (eg, parsing input, like a forum/guestbook post). Again, it's a programmer vs web designer thing I think, which is probably why we have both :)

On that note, IE has a long-standing bug where if a <BR> appears and the text on the line is exactly the right length, an extra feed is inserted... only IE shows this behavior though, and I do believe it to be a bug IMO...

To expand on a completely unrelated topic -- I thought this "tab" thing in Mozilla was just another dumb feature, but I'm already in love with it... I like having to manage only one browser window, and still having several sites open...

[Tibbits]

hmm... IE for OSX.. does that mean we'll see IE on Linux?

[Mandi]

The only trouble with using <br><br> in place of <p>, is that you can't use <p align=____> type attributes. Of course it'll default left, so no biggie if that's what you want. But there's no justify, no align-right (useful for a few situations.)

[Justin]

I had completely forgotten about justify -- for right align, I generally end up inside a table with <td align=right>, but even that's not often for me. But again, developer vs designer; designers want it to look nice, developers want it to work.

There's also <div> for right alignment, which I've used once or twice... but for centering I still use good old <center> :)

As for justified text, I find it harder to read personally. Each line has different spacing, and the eyes constantly have to re-adjust, which makes justified text more tiring to read IMO. I don't have any real scientific evidence to support this, and it might just be me... but I tend to stay away from justified text for that reason. Plus it requires the <P> tag, which I hate so much (in my best Homer Simpson voice :P).

[Harley]

designers want it to look nice, developers want it to work. ...ah ... ahem ... don't get me started .... :* :)

Regards!

Harley

- http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=holistic -