Or as the title might read…

Alternative font use for the web.

Alternative font use is an option more web designers should be exploring.  Are you sick of the “web-safe” fonts as much as I am? Well, there are some options. Here is an interesting article about it by Ross Johnson called “8 FONTS YOU PROBABLY DON’T USE IN CSS, BUT SHOULD“.

Ross got his availability percentages from codestyle.org which I thought gave a good overview of which faces would be correctly rendered on windows, Mac and Linux.

If the 8 that Ross talks about aren’t enough for you and you just want to be able to use any face. You may have already heard of the alternative solutions that dynamically replace type on your webpage as the page loads.

Are you already from the sIFR school of thought? Perhaps a Cufón devotee? Maybe a Typeface.js groupie? A fan of FLIR?

They each have their strengths and weaknesses but I still feel that despite being slightly more complicated to set up, sIFR covers all the bases I need covered. And it does it without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, markup semantics or copying and pasting text out of the browser window which are all very important to our clients and their users.

However, I’d like to hear from people about their preferences and why and if there are other up and coming solutions I’ve left out.

Weigh in!