selecting user-standard fonts

special tags to access user-selected fonts

[RFranzen]

In my pages, I avoid overriding the standard fonts the user has selected in his preferences. If he likes Bookman or Lucida, etc., no problem. Thus I limit my font-selections to relative size variances (eg "-1" instead of "2"), color, <tt>, and <pre>.

Mozilla/Netscape has added new flexibility, though. Users can now select more than just their preferred proportional and monospace (fixed-width) fonts. Ok, for fixed-width there is still only one choice. But for proportional, the user can select his preferred font for:

• serif
  
• san-serif
  
• cursive
  
• fantasy
  

He can also choose whether to make his default proportional font be serif or sans-serif.

Are there tags that allow a web author to choose one of the specialized, user-selected fonts? For example, if I want to use the user's desired sans-serif font, how would I do it?

I would like a w3c-standard way to make the selection, but IE6 doesn't seem to allow the user this much flexibility. It only allows two user-selected default fonts, proportional and fixed-width. (Of course, Netscape 4 and earlier didn't allow more choice than this, either.) Since unrecognized tags and tag-elements are ignored, I hope there is a standard way to design in accordance with the user's preferences, not mine.

-- Rich

[dingman]

would this do the trick?

<style type="text/css">
.fantasy
{
font-family: fantasy,fontforIE;
}

Actually, it looks like that works in IE6 on my wife's machine as well as in Mozilla. I was looking for an option to set the 'fantasy' font in IE6 when in crashed on me.