A major constraint for the web designer is the limitation of available fonts. The current generation of browsers can only display text using the fonts installed any individual computer. (In creating this page I have no idea what fonts are installed on your computer!) So the designer has to use only the system fonts installed on all PC's or Mac's, which essentially means one sans-serif and one serif font.

To alleviate this restriction many web designers use the fonts that they have installed to create navigation panels and headlines and then convert them into graphics (images) for use on the web page, this is time consuming and slows the download of the page and makes copying/pasting of text less satisfactory.

One solution is embedding the fonts used by the web designer on the web page. There are various systems available although none are yet wholly satisfactory. Normally vendors require that a font must have been purchased for use on each computer on which it is displayed, so embedding technology attempts to display the font without permanently installing it on the (unlicensed) users system.

Flash type

Another partial solution is to use Flash (like the animated intros to this site) or Adobe Acrobat® to create PDF (portable document format) files. Although excellent technologies they only partly solve the problem.
The implications of each alternative must be carefully explained to the client.

The humble system fonts can be given greater typographical finesse by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): these allow greater control over size, tracking and leading than the standard HTML. The style sheet can be linked to any number of pages so that a change to it will be reflected in all linked pages.