Re: Seriffed and sans-serif fonts?

Joe English (jenglish@crl.com)
Wed, 19 Apr 1995 13:56:31 +0500


Philippe-Andre Prindeville <philipp@res.enst.fr> wrote:

> We need to control whether some text
> (which is heavily annotated) is rendered in seriffed or sans-serif
> fonts. Why? Simple.
>
> Examples of usage of text and idioms are given in seriffed fonts.
>
> Comments on the utilisation and the parts of speech, ie. the
> annotation itself, needs to be rendered in a sans-serif font.
> It doesn't really matter which: universe, avant-garde, helvetica,
> geneva, etc.

*Must* it be rendered in a sans-serif font, or does it just
need to be displayed *differently* than the annotated text?

This sounds like a good application for the CLASS attribute
and stylesheets, in either case.

I'm not sure if any of the current style-sheet proposals
support this particular distinction (seriffed vs. sans serif),
though my (defunct) proposal allowed the author to specify
"normal" and "alternate" logical font families, and recommended
that browsers use seriffed and sans-serif fonts for the
"normal" and "alternate" families respectively (or vice-versa).

See <URL:http://www.art.com/~joe/stylesheets/def.fontfam.html>.

> Can we introduce a new mechanism? <ss> (for sans-serif)?

Please, no.

--Joe English

jenglish@crl.com