Using special fonts for headlines

[kidd6441]

I've lurked a little bit here, but this is my first post. Great forum here!

I'm designing a website for a client that wants to use the Serpentine font for all of his headlines. My understanding from aways back is that browsers can only use the fonts on the client computer, so the only way to have Serpentine work on all computers is to make the headlines images. But this will detract from SEO.

Is there any newer way I don't know of to include fonts into the site itself, or are we still stuck with serif or sans-serif? I know there's a CSS hack to "swap" images with text in an h1 tag, but I'd rather not clutter up the site with a lot of unnecessary images if I can help it.

[tedster]

You can use sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement [mikeindustries.com]) to display a special font for headlines. If someone has Flash turned off, it degrades quite gracefully. It's in use on many top-shelf news sites and the like.

[kidd6441]

Thanks tedster! I'll look into sIFR.

[tedster]

If you're adventurous, you can look into sIFR version 3 [novemberborn.net] which has moved from a long time in alpha to a formal beta version. The font smoothing is a significant upgrade.