Typekit Practice

The type maker’s view of web fonts: An interview with Tim Ahrens

Tim Ahrens, writing for Typekit:

It is very tempting to put special ligatures or alternate glyphs onto rarely used character positions in order to make them available, or to use private-use Unicode values for accessing small caps, for example. However, although it would look fine in the browser, this would make the text “unreadable” for robots, it would give you flawed plain text when copying from a website, and display incorrectly where web fonts are not supported.

Keeping the underlying text strictly semantic is the key virtue.