Small-caps, web text, and CSS

There’s a trick to getting small-caps to work on the web, and it’s counter-intuitive.

Let’s say you had an abbreviation, like CSS, that you wanted to put into small-caps, say with a little extra tracking. You might think you could use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps, and you’d be good to go. Not so.

Here’s why. Because for small-caps to work, you need to start with lowercase letters.

However, when you’re simply typing your thoughts out before you’ve decided on small-caps for abbreviations, acronyms, etc., you probably typed those abbreviations in uppercase.

So, when you tried small-caps, it simply didn’t work. For example, see this web page from 2005 that Joe Clark wrote to test small-caps. Note how the small-caps versions are more like regular capital letters. Not cool. It makes the hack look good, which is bad.

So, here’s what you can do (and what I think browsers ought to be doing automatically anyway):

1. First apply text-transform: lowercase
2. Then apply font-variant: small-caps

That ought to do it.

Here’s a more specific example of the CSS.

abbr, acronym {
text-transform: lowercase;
font-variant: small-caps;
letter-spacing: 1px;
}