CSS formatting

Most browsers, not only legacy browsers, have a hard time fully supporting Cascading Style Sheets. FAIRY alleviates this problem by letting all browsers support CSS. This is done by upgrading Web pages on the server to HTML 4.0 with CSS level 2, and then downgrading them to the appropriate HTML standard for any particular browser.

Formatting will always be applied to the right elements on a page by FAIRY. For example, you may specify with CSS that all images within tables should have a black border. This would work regardless of if a browser knows CSS or not.

The amount of formatting that is applied may be limited for legacy browsers though. For example, a browser may not support border styles. Still, text and colors would be set correctly for all browsers.

OTL Formatting

Since FAIRY supports OpenType Layout fonts (a.k.a. OTL fonts), typographical formatting features are supported as well. Such features are defined in the font that is being used. Typical features include "old style numerals", "discretionary ligatures" and "kerning pairs".

We support OTL through a new CSS property that we call "text-otl". The value of this property is a list of OTL features to apply for some piece of text. These names are the same names that are found in the fonts, and are four letter acronyms. For example, "ligatures" is denoted as 'liga'.

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