BBC News

[Phil]

is it me or has the BBC news website changed its font or something? looks more spaced now. not that i'm sitting at work reading it, of course.


BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk)

[Phil]

no, it is me.

i just installed Mac Office 2004 and its put some new system fonts on my machine which are getting picked up by my browser.

apols for this non-story

[David]

BBC News uses the Verdana font - I guess there just isn't a direct equivalent on the Mac. Was it substituted with Helvetica? If so, that would look different.

[francis]

Why you should avoid using Verdana. (http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html)
BBC News stylesheet (http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/css/news.css)

For those not inclined to peek:

body{
background-color:#FFFFFF;
border:0px;
margin:0px;
font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,"MS sans serif";
font-size:13px;
font-weight:normal;
color:#000000;
}

Couple of other useful CSS resources links whilst I'm here:

CSS Panic Guide (http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/css/) (the righthand nav area is, in everything bar IE, an example of position:fixed)

Font sizing in browers (http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/font/index.html) - this is a monster (264 screen shots across many PC and Mc browsers). Not updated since 2002 so a little out of date, but it will give you a good idea of the kind of thing to look out for

[Phil]

it does look different on my Mac now. I just used whatTheFont to identify it from a screenshot. it thinks its Four Wagner. Some mistake i think



http://www.eds.gre.ac.uk/temp/bbc.jpg

[francis]

Strange - does it look anything like the Mac's defualt sans-serif font? You'd think that the browser would stop at that if it didn't have Verdana, Arial or Helvetica installed.

[David]

Francis, can you mend the URL on your "Why you should avoid using Verdana" link. It sounds interesting - especially as Verdana is sooo widely used at the moment. I prefer Arial/Helvetica myself but I think a lot of people use Verdana simply because it is not Arial.

[francis]

Yep - all done