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.