Posted by Andy Dingley on 09/05/05 03:24

On 3 Sep 2005 14:57:16 -0700, michele@quality-computing.com wrote:

>That's interesting what you say about Verdana; it's my font of choice.
>What do you like?

Who cares what you, I or David like ? It's what the _users_ have that
matters. We can wrangle about our personal favourites as much as we
like, but if the user who we're presenting the page to doesn't have that
font, then it just isn't going to happen for them. It's still a
publishing task, not an exercise in personal creativity.

Yes, web font selection is poor. Reliably you have the choice of serif
or sans-serif, and hope that the user has a reasonable default
incarnation of each of those.

Verdana is nasty. As a typeface it's OK, but nothing special. The reason
it's "readable" though is simply that it cheats on the height to appear
bigger for a given specified size. This is a damn nuisance to work with,
especially when you encounter non-Windows users who don't have it. Just
choose a commonplace and well-behaved font, and give it a size that's
readable anyway.

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