The font name is correct. Apparently, there are a lot of fonts for Tamil, and for some obscure reason, the back-end was developed to use the TAB~ fonts.
when I replaced the span tags with font face=TabMalli, it worked.
But when I plugged the part back into the project, it didn't. The culprit >>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
When I removed this line, the font was displayed properly, but EVERYTHING else looks totally screwed up.
The project is pretty huge, and already half complete because testing was mainly restricted to IE6 ( with valid reasons ). But now, the management requires portability to Firefox also, and I have NO idea how I am going to get this working. Please help!!