Optimized Appearance - Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML - page 325

The opening and closing quotation marks appear identical in certain typefaces, known as the straight, vertical, or
typewriter quotation marks, which should not be used in the text flow. On the other hand, these characters are used in
the markup as the delimiters of attribute values.

■ many text editors do not support typographic (curly) quotation marks and insert their misused equivalents.
One of the options for getting the proper quotation marks is to insert them in a word processor (usually by pressing
Shift+2) and then copy the characters to the source code through the clipboard.

Tip

Even if the proper quotation marks are used in the markup, browsers might render them incorrectly. Although
it is a straightforward idea to apply the q tag for short quotations, 2 browsers render it differently. Firefox 3.6.6 renders
both the opening and the closing quotes correctly. However, IE8 incorrectly applies the character „ for opening the
quote (the closing is correct). In Safari 5 and Opera 10.6, the misused equivalent " is used for rendering. However,
rendering quotes also depends on the language being used and relies on proper language settings in the markup.

Web Fonts
Originally, the Web was developed as a text-based medium. Initially, the selection of fonts available to web designers
was limited to the intersection of fonts natively installed on all major platforms. In 1998, the CSS2 specification
introduced a font matching and downloading mechanism (which has been dropped in CSS 2.1). In CSS3, external fonts
can be applied, along with the declaration of multiple (similar) fonts as a fallback option if the specific fonts cannot be
downloaded or are not installed on the user's computer. The technique has both legal and technical issues, however.
Fonts are generally copyrighted; thus, their font files cannot be stored and used on web sites. Even the ones
that are advertised as free fonts cannot be used for web sites in many cases [11]. Since a standard font pack has been
released under the “Core fonts for the Web” program by Microsoft, the fonts Arial, Georgia, and Verdana (among
others) have become de facto fonts on the Web.

■ the character repertoire of typefaces varies greatly. While the english alphabet and the common
punctuation marks are supported by most font files, the list of supported characters should be a major concern for sites
written in a natural language other than english. multilingual sites should not apply font files that do not support the full
range of required characters, which would make it possible to apply the same fonts for the different language versions.
One of the options to avoid nonsupported characters is to apply Unicode fonts. however, not all fonts presented on font
collection sites as “Unicode fonts” support a really wide range of Unicode characters. in fact, the ones that do are typically
20mB to 25mB in size (compared to the typical font file size of 50KB to 300KB), which is inadequate for web publishing:
the fonts won't appear while the font files are being downloaded, and this would take much more time than downloading
the entire page with all of its components, including images.

Caution

From the technical point of view, the browser support for font embedding and downloading varies from
browser to browser. However, the differences are decreasing because of standardization and the growing popularity
of implementations. Embedded OpenType ( EOT ) font embedding is supported by Internet Explorer from version 4.
Other browsers have introduced font linking for TrueType (TT) and OpenType (OT) fonts (Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10+,
Safari 3.1+, Google Chrome 4.0+). Internet Explorer 9+ also supports TT/OT fonts but only those that have embedded

2 If the quotation is longer than one line, the blockquote tag should be used instead.