[whatwg] Semantic use of the <font> element

[gary turner]

David Walbert wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2007, at 5:24 PM, Nicholas Shanks wrote:
> 
>> My content goes something like this:
>>
>> <span style="font-family:Helvetica">This is a sample of 
>> Helvetica</span><br>
>> <span style="font-family:Arial">This is a sample of Arial</span>
> 
> If the sense of the text absolutely depends on its being displayed in a 
> particular font, might it be better to display it in an image? Helvetica 
> and Arial are on almost every computer, but an image would leave no 
> doubt, and since the content is, essentially, the visual representation 
> of itself, an image would seem to me to be semantically appropriate.
> 

Agreed.

Since the visual representation *is* the content, the font demo should 
definitely be an image or other graphic object.  This has the further 
advantage of being UA, platform and resident-font agnostic.  If the UA 
is non-graphic, the user would still have the opportunity to open the 
image in a viewer.  There is no such option if you're dependent on style 
properties or upon the font tag.

cheers,

gary