Dynamic Text Replacement: A List Apart
Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML.
Short version, take normal boring text, as limited by the narrow range of available fonts (see earlier blog entry regarding this), and making images that can use any font and virtually any type of styling to make things a bit more interesting…all on the fly with very little effort.
Coming to a blog near you very soon. 
Wandering the Interwebs 