From the course: Backgrounder: A History of Web Typography

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Where we are now with web typography

Where we are now with web typography

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] All right, I think it's time for a recap. The web started as a tool to share documents over the internet in a standardized way. That's why we have HTML and the HTTP protocol. As the web evolved designers wanted control over the appearance of those documents. This gave birth to the idea of web design and a design language for the web, CSS. CSS brought the promise of custom typography on the web but that promise was forwarded by the lack of open font formats and concern for font piracy by font foundries. As a result, even though the technology for web fonts existed, designers were confined to using web safe fonts. To work around this issue, designers turned to proprietary formats like flash and inaccessible solutions like font image replacements to bring their designs to the web. It looked great but made the web slow and exclusionary. This all changed when the creator of CSS convinced Microsoft…

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