Nathan at Work

Last night I spent a wedge of time considering the various forms of container I could choose for this blog, I then moved on to fonts, which I’ll cover in a minute.

@context
I’m feeling a bit frustrated today and trying not to loose interest, I’m one who likes to get my head stuck in to something and not stop until it’s complete. The approach of considering every single decision made whilst designing and developing this blog is therefore doing my nut in a little; alas though I feel like I should stick with it and cover all the incredibly boring subjects which have plagued my life, work life anyways, for many years. On with the show then.

@research @resource
seeing as I’m going to be using xhtml strict along with css 2.1 (maybe 3..), best to find out what w3c has to say about the css font-family property in short they recommend going for a font-family such as helvetica followed by a generic font family such as sans-serif.

Perhaps the most basic choice of all, which font family to use on the blog, an easy choice one would think – just skip through the font list and stop at one you like. I wish.. as with all things web you need to consider support, somebody could be viewing this site on a blackberry, playstaton 3, any of the web browsers, on any of the operating systems, with any amount of standard or non standard font’s installed.

Realistically then I need to choose a font family that is common to at least all operating systems and web browsers from mac os x to ubuntu via windows. fun.. but first I need that list.

@research @resource
After much googleing (-e?) I found this handy web font blog post by Dustin Brewer which gives me more or less that list; coupled with these additional dated yet useful notes from Browser News I do believe I’ve got my font armory all figured out.

The Choices.. playing it safe I can either simply select a generic font family or one of the following combinations:

see how short that list was? I thought it best to double check, so I quickly made a list of all the fonts on my windows vista ultimate box, then opened up the latest version of Ubuntu which I’ve got running in the fantastic and liberating xVM VirtualBox from Sun. Guess what, other than monospace there were no common fonts between the two; a quick thought later and it seems obvious that there will be zero common fonts accross all platforms, hence I’m sticking to a generic font family.

@tangent on virtualbox worthy of it’s own post

@context
writing that post on something I’m interested in and have postive thoughts about was a nice break from this boring but needed font post, consider spirits to be listed a bit.

One could simply select a font family on each os, put them in order in a font-family css property, but that would require picking a font on each os, checking back to see it’s on the last few os versions and then hoping for the best; browsers aren’t actually required to honour the designers choice of font you see. (I don’t have the time, the hundreds of machines or wish to do so, if you do.. knock yourself out and good luck!)

The choices:

• serif
• sans-serif
• cursive
• fantasy
• monospace

as BrowserNews said.. “a paltry choice”.. actually it’s worth checking this list to see what they look like on your machine.

After checking on both Ubuntu and Vista, I’m going with:

• text: sans-serif
• titles: serif
• code: monospace

I am very tempted to go with tried and tested font-family combo’s though:

• text: Arial, Helvetica, Univers, ‘Nimbus Sans L’, Tahoma, sans-serif;
• titles: Georgia, ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif;
• code: ‘Dark Courier’, ‘Courier New’, Courier, monospace;

Hard for a blog to be unique, well designed, smary with such lame choices, somebody should address this.

@context
considering how crap life would be if everything could either be black, grey, brown, green or white; although they are possibly the most common. Saturday night and blogging about which font to choose while the other half updates the mp3 site and fills my ears with next years news though, so not all bad.

@tangent
I always want to finish every post “regards” like it’s an email or a mailing list post.

regards