Font options for web pages used to be limited to just a few standard fonts that could be counted on to work consistently for most of your site’s visitors. Thankfully, a font revolution has occurred and the options have greatly expanded from the early days of web development. Thanks to a technology called fontface and generous font providers such as fontsquirrel and google fonts, there are a huge number of free fonts that you can count on to show up in just about any modern browser. [footnote]Commercial fonts as in non-free, are also available[/footnote] Using these new fonts is slightly more complicated than the standard ones, but not all that hard once you understand how it works.
One of the most important concepts to grasp is how fonts work. In order to display text in a given font the browser must receive data that defines the look of each character [footnote] abcdetc [/footnote]. There are two ways to use the new non-standard fonts: your browser can pull the data from a central location such as the servers that house the Google font collection, or you can download all of the necessary font data from a provider such as fontsquirrel and house it on your server.
You are about to learn how to use both methods.