It seems frustrating that in this day and age we are still limited to less than a dozen "safe" typographical fonts.

Isn`t it time that the W3C, the OS manufacturers, the browser makers or whoever got together and found away to expand the range of fonts that
designers can work with?

And yes I know about sIFR but that is really just a work around to a problem that needs to be addressed in the first place.

Nope nobody is limited to a certain range of fonts because of the typography of browsers. Browsers now can render all types of fonts equally.


The limitation is the fonts that are installed on a users system. Designers can use absolutely any font at all that is on their machine, be it a Windows machine, Linux machine or a Mac. But unless that font is actually installed on the remote users end it won't be used. And the reason there aren't more standard fonts is purely down to licensing.

For IE, WEFT has been around a long time now, but until CSS 3 comes of age it is unlikely to be that font downloading on demand will be built into other browsers.

I think it's more of a licensing issue than anything else. Certain fonts are owned by certain companies. For Windows to buy all of these for all of customers (i.e. XP, Vista etc.) would simply cost a fortune when, really, 20 or so fonts is more than ample for the standard user.