Development

HTML: Dress Right - Go Bottomless

Have you ever noticed, while using a style sheet or other method of absolute positioning in HTML, that position 0,0 is the upper left corner? All references to establish width and height assume the page has no predefined right side or bottom. HTML is in fact designed not to have a right border or page bottom. This becomes a primary consideration for web design.

Why worry?

HTML: Basic Fonts

A web designer, among other things, needs to select a font that can be viewed by nearly all OS's and browsers. Why? Well, fonts are not pushed over the internet with the HTML pages. Rather, the browser relies on locally installed fonts (those installed on the browsing machine) to render the text. If the font is not installed when the browser connects, the browser uses a "default" font installed on the users machine and specified by a setting in the browser. As a web developer, you can use a fancy font in html/css and hope users have it installed. Or use fonts that are provided generically with most operating systems.

So, what are the basic fonts for use with html/css? Here's a nifty table for reference, grouped by font family.