Typography and CSS2

CSS1 vs. CSS2

A designers dream will always be to bring some amount of typographic aesthetics into a webpage.
Because the main challenge online is that, people to a great extent tend to scan the content that actually read it. So one has to judiciously use techniques to highlight important text. How different yet technically viable a site can be made in terms of text, will be the top of mind concern for any designer.

With little extra time spent on style sheet authoring, all these can be achieved to a great extent with the CSS2 techniques.

The effect of judiciously exploiting CSS2 can be seen in the following links which Garrett Dimon in his article "CSS Typography" in the Digital web magazine.
http://www.Kottke.org
http://www.RobWeychert.com
http://www.Subtraction.com
http://www.AListApart.com

In CSS1 fonts used were assumed to be in the client's system and were identified solely by name. Alternate fonts were specified through the properties. CSS2 gives the liberty to the author to describe the font that is to be used. And the user to select a font when the author's requested font is not immediately available.

The beauty of CSS2 is that, it defines the information in the client/user agent database and allows stylesheet authors to contribute to it. To display a character with a particular font, the user agent first identifies the "best fit" form the data base. Then retrieves font data locally or from the web to display the character using the particular glyphs.

So in css2 there are basically two mechanisms, font specification by the author and font selection by the user agent.

css2 specifies fonts according to the following characteristics
Font family, font style, font variant, font weight, font stretch and font size.
As a fall back mechanism generic family name is always specified as in css1. The five generic font families are serif, sans-serif, cursive, fantasy and monospace

In font selection by the user agent, there are four possible actions. Font name matching, intelligent font matching, font synthesis and font download.

This is just a snap preview of the concepts. Elaborate details are available at w3c