Pleasing the brand police

February 20, 2006, 12:26 pm

Barclays have recently updated their web pages to reflect the new brand. Had someone told the brand guys that they no-longer needed to render fonts in HTML – they could use images for fonts.  Immediate impressions with this is that it is getting the stylesheet to do something it was never intended to. Aren’t style and content supposed to be seperated? But it is for the developers to argue the elegence of the solution. You cannot argue that it appears to finally give those people in marketing what they’ve always wanted on the web – anti-aliassed fonts. (And accessible to! we’re using stylesheets, look! I can turn the style off on my browser and the image is replaced by a nice and large header! No more need for alt tags! Whoppeee  But hang on. A little digging reveals that the web killjoy of accesibility says it is not a good idea after all. The ephemeral smile on the brand police face has vanished. We’ll be using html fonts after all.