Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 03/29/07 13:52

Scripsit Cogito:

> Come to think of it, this is mainly a "local HTML page". Well, I may
> use it to impress some visiting friends but that's about it.

Then you might just as well impress people by doing things _right_.

Using fancy, Wingdings-like font is the wrong way - "fontistic fantasy".
When you have the letter "x" in an HTML document's content, it _means_ the
letter "x". A browser should actually refuse to display it using a
Wingdings-like font, since a font should only be used for _characters_
actually included into the font. See
http://alis.isoc.org/web_ml/html/fontface.en.html
(The same arguments apply when using CSS for the purpose.)

The right way is to use an image, with an adequate alt text (e.g., alt="D",
depending on language), or to use the Unicode characters for chess pieces:
♕ white queen
♛ black queen

Support to them in fonts is not widespread, see
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2655/fontsupport.htm
but you can install a suitable font for your local use, and for other users,
it is sufficient for them to have _any_ font supporting the character(s)
used. Besides, many of them already have such a font, since Arial Unicode MS
is one of them and it is normally installed when you install some MS Office
software, like MS Word.

Since IE isn't very clever in using fonts, you should probably include a
rule like
td { font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Code2000; }
into your style sheet (assuming all of your table cells contain chess piece
characters only).

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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