I like tabular numerals. But you really need a small set of other glyphs to be tabular to really make them work. In particular, you need the plus and minus signs to be the same width, so that in a table like:
gold +1.2%
oil -6.4%
corn +5.2%
everything lines up and looks nice. At the moment, with CSS, there's no way to make that happen, and in normal typefaces the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus signs with a wider dash, but that is semantically wrong and also a pain in the arse.
It occurs to me that contextual alternates could make this Just Work. I haven't used any typefaces expensive enough to do that though!
It occurs to me that contextual alternates could make this Just Work. I haven't used any typefaces expensive enough to do that though!