I have finally begun my five-years-in-a-making web project and I decided to throw a simple countdown splash screen to give myself a little motivation to get it finished. Something that has always ticked me off about the Internet is the fact that despite all the standardization that we attempt to put forth with the W3C, Acid, and the HTML 5 movement it is still fucking impossible to pick a decent font that you can guarantee will be on (most) platforms. As a programmer, I absolutely loathe web design, in fact that is usually the barrier to entry for most of my web projects – I can not figure out the damn design – but through trial and error I generally am able to produce something which is at least a little pleasurable to look at.
This brings me to the topic at hand. The Google Font API (and the Google Font Directory) was announced at the Google I/O conference and detailed in this Google code blog post. What Google has basically done is created a repository that makes fonts freely available to web designers (and programmers) with a simple HTML stylesheet include. Before I even finished their blog post I was immediately cursing Microsoft because Internet Explorer 6 is usually the reason why technologies such as this do not get adopted quicker, but I was amazed even more, Internet Explorer 6.0 and up are supported!
As you can see on typealoud.com it is really as simple as these two lines of HTML/CSS.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Reenie+Beanie"> <style> h1 { font-family:'Reenie Beanie', serif; } </style> <h1>123 days until launch.</h1>
Go take a look at Google’s blog post on the matter and start using the Font API in your own projects. Happy coding!