Web typography
For years the web has had to make do with a boring selection of 'web safe' fonts. When some fancy typography was essential for a design, it was necessary to substitute a graphical element for it and used a text-indent rule to shift the actual text from the viewport. Oh, the joy!
There were also a few inventive methods for adding fancy typography to a page along the way. sIFR (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) and Cufón (http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/) used Flash and JavaScript respectively to re-make text elements appear as the fonts they were intended to be. Thankfully, CSS3 provides a means of custom web typography that is now ready for the big time.
The @font-face CSS rule
The @font-face CSS rule has been around since CSS2 (but subsequently absent in CSS 2.1). It was even supported partially by Internet Explorer 4 (no, really)! So what's it doing here, when we're supposed to be talking about CSS3?
Well, as it turns out, @font-face was re-introduced for the CSS3...