Attribute for <FONT ...>
FACE = "text string"
This information is presented for the sake of completion and historical accuracy.
Don't use the
<FONT ...> tag. It will make your life difficult. See
Break the <FONT> Habit for an easy tutorial on styles. If you would like to learn how to set font faces, see
Font Family.
FACE tells the browser what font face (also called a "typestyle") to use for the text. For example, to make the text appear in the Arial font we use this code:
| this code |
produces this |
<FONT FACE="Arial">Hello there</FONT>
|
Hello there |
This code assumes, however, that the browser's computer has the "Arial" font installed. That's not an assumption you can make. For this reason, FACE allows you to list more than one possible face, to get a better chance of listing a face the browser's computer has. List all the possible faces to try, separated by commas, in order of preference.
| this code |
produces this |
<FONT FACE="sans-serif, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva">Hello there</FONT>
|
Hello there |
In this case, the browser will first look for the generic font "sans-serif" (see more about generic
fonts below). If the browser doesn't find "sans-serif", it will look for "Arial". If it doesn't find
that, it will look for "Helvetica", and so on. Most computers reading the web which understand fonts
at all will understand at least one of these four font faces, which makes
sans-serif, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva
a
popular combination.
The latest versions of Netscape and MSIE allow you to specify generic font families.
Generic font families are not actual fonts, they are general purpose names to which the browser assigns an actual font. For example, most Windows 95 computers assign "sans-serif" to "Arial". Generic font families come from the style sheet standards established by
W3C. "sans-serif" is by far the most useful of the families. The others are:
- serif: for most browsers this is the default font family anyway
- monospace: better to use
<TT>
- cursive: not supported by most browsers
- fantasy: not supported by most browsers
