From the course: Backgrounder: A History of Web Typography

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Limitations on web fonts

Limitations on web fonts

(bright music) - [Instructor] Back when CSS was invented, there was no way for a website to supply the browser with a font. As a result, the website would have to instead ask the browser, "Hey, do you have this font, "and if so, could you please use it?" And the developer would have to gamble on that font being available. To increase the chance of a chosen font being available and retaining some semblance of control over what font the browser ended up using, the developer would supply a list of fonts, a family of related fonts and say, "Hey, try Helvetica, "and if you don't have that font, try Arial, "and if you don't have that font, "just use whatever San Serif font you have available." Because of this platform limitation, for the first decade and a half of the web, designers were pretty much confined to using one of the three font families we made earlier. Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif, Times New Roman, Times…

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