- The use of fonts on the World Wide Web. When HTML was created, font faces and styles were controlled exclusively by the settings of each web browser. There was no mechanism for individual web pages to control font display until Netscape introduced the
font element in 1995, which was then standardized in HTML 3.2. However, the font specified had to be installed on the user’s computer or a fallback font, such as a browser’s default sans-serif or monospace font, would be used. The CSS 2 specification attempted to improve the font selection process by adding font matching, synthesis, and download. These techniques did not gain much use, and were removed in CSS 2.1. However, Internet Explorer added support for the font downloading feature in version 4.0, released in 1997, which was later included in the CSS 3 fonts module, and has since been implemented in Safari 3.1, Opera 10, and Firefox 3.5. This has subsequently increased interest in web typography, as well as the usage of web fonts. ← Wikipedia
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