If only all of these font providers all had APIs, we could pull them all into Drupal and use a standard interface to apply a wide variety of fonts to our designs without needing to hunt down who offers which fonts and deal with the a slightly different system at every provider. That's the idea behind @font-your-face: a common interface for dealing with fonts from all over the web in Drupal.

It's one thing to talk about the importance of progressive enhancement. But how does it actually work in practice? Let's take a look at a specific example from a recently launched site.

Elevators are nice. But if an architect designed a multi-story building with no stairs, he'd be immediately identified as unprofessional and probably fired. Some day the web will similarly dismiss websites without progressive enhancement.