The best ampersand
Thursday 14th of August, 2008
We've been hearing a fair bit about the humble ampersand in recent months. Much of this is thanks to the efforts of the excellent (and thorough) The Ampersand, but another major fan of the typographer's favourite squiggle is Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits. Today, Dan put up an interesting article about using a separate CSS font-family declaration for ampersands, based on Robert Bringhurst's advice:
“ Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are often the more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text. ”
Thoughtfully, Dan (or more accurately his new colleague, Meagan Fisher) has provided a series of charts showing the ampersands available in the default font sets of OS X, XP and Vista. Also worth noting (for the Semanticists in the room, at least) is Jeremy Keith's comment regarding the use of abbr rather than span tags. Another semantics fist-fight waiting to happen? We can only hope...
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