Posted by Lauri Raittila on 06/04/05 23:10

in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design, Andy Dingley wrote:
> Hypothesis:
> There are two, and only two, appropriate ways to do this in CSS.
>
> font-family: serif;
>
> font-family: sans-serif;
>
> Discuss.

First one is not good IMHO. Latter is worse than none, but not that much
(when user prefers something else - generic sans-serif is either verdana
or arial, neither of is very nice sans font for webbrowsing...).

serif is as bad as TNR - will screw up anyone that has selected Arial or
other similar sans font to be default, as it easily gets unreadable on
sizes sans fonts are still OK. (Sure 0.001% of people have adjusted serif
to something comparable, but some might use some nicer and even less
readable serif...)

> Systems (with font capability) may be expected to implement these rules
> correctly, with some locally-appropriate choice of default font. Without
> knowing names of local fonts, there's barely any more possible choice
> than this.

Not really. IIRC, IE4 and early IE5 had lots of problems with generic
font-families.

> Comic Sans is likely to be found and identifiable on a significant
> number of systems. The reasons not to use it are aesthetic, not
> technical.

It is suitable for headings and stuff, just like almost any other font.

IMO, generic font family is just as bad as any other font family for body
text. It is practically always TNR or Arial anyway, and when not is more
something horrible than something better.

My conclusion:
1. for body text font, do absolute nothing
2. for headers, do what you want, as long as you don't use generic
families exept sans-serif...
3. for monospace, use appropiate HTML element, and don't use generic
monospace without good reason, it will use courier far too likely, which
is bad as courier is not always TTF...




--
Lauri Raittila <http://www.iki.fi/lr> <http://www.iki.fi/zwak/fonts>
Utrecht, NL.
Support me, buy Opera:
https://secure.bmtmicro.com/opera/buy-opera.html?AID=882173

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