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by Timwi 408 days ago
> (0) that reproduce everywhere on any OS perfectly

Can somebody explain why this isn't the case for HTML? I'm frequently in a situation where a website that mimics printed pages fails to render the same between Firefox and Chrome. I wish to understand the primary culprit here. I thought all of the CSS units are completely defined?

2 comments

I think this is the result of 1) it being a moving target and 2) HTML and CSS being a de facto standard rather than de jure, where the (differing) implementations define at least part of the spec.

You also can't really embed fonts in a HTML file, you rely on linking instead -- and those can rot. Apparently there has been some work towards it (base64 encoded), but support may vary. And you need to embed the whole font, I don't think you can do character subsets easily.

Probably due to different font rendering in the OS.