Aliases for fonts in CSS

Question

I've just got into using @font-face. One of the unexpected perks is that instead of using the proper font name I can choose a more useful one, which is useful for reskinning

e.g instead of

@font-face {
   font-family: Museo Slab;
   src: ...
}

I can have

@font-face {
   font-family: Branding Font A;
   src: ...
}

So throughout my site I can then have e.g.

h1 {
  font-family: Branding Font A, Georgia, Serif;
}

... pretty useful as the site I'm working on will be syndicated, and I can easily just serve up different @font-face definitions for different publishers.

After that lengthy preamble, my question is "Is there a way to have an alias for one of the regular webfonts?" So that I can have eg "Body Text" as an alias for Arial, but such that I could change the "Body Text" @font-face declaration to use a different font if I wanted to.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure the answer is no. But if there is a way I'd really like to know about it!

One way that might sorta work is:

@font-face {
   font-family: Alias;
   src: local('Arial');
}