As a designer who is interested in typography, one of the most frustrating problems I have ran into this year now I have started to learn about web design is the issue of typeface choice for websites. Transitioning from mainly print-based work which has had been printed on a stock chosen by the designer and exists rather statically in front of it's audience, I know have to take into account the diverse ways may work may be seen under such as differing screen resolutions. Fonts also fall under this category as different computers, running different operating systems of varying ages all have a different selection of fonts available to them. If you choose to use a certain typeface for a website and the viewer does not have that specific typeface on their computer, the website will be displayed differently or perhaps, not at all.
Reading up on this I found about web-safe fonts which can be chosen to minimise design inconsistencies through a selection of commonly available fonts. What's interesting though is there is a way round this using a feature supported in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a coding language used to style web pages. The @font-face rule. This allows the designer to specify a certain font, and then upload and link to that font on the server so that the viewer's web browser can request to download the font if it isn't available on that computer.
Alas though, this solution to the problem isn't without criticism, particularly from type foundries that often have license agreements that prohibit you to upload this typefaces to a server. There is an interesting article over on Ars Technica that talks about this issue.
To see what all of this has the (beautiful) potential to do, make sure you have the latest version of Safari, Firefox or Opera and head on over here.
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