Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 01/31/06 13:00

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Mike Massonnet wrote:

> http://www.sitepoint.com/article/anatomy-web-fonts

Which recommends:

|| body {
|| font-family: verdana, "trebuchet MS", helvetica, sans-serif;
|| }

without any mention of the consequences.

Either the author is unaware of the issues explored at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html ,
or has chosen to keep them quiet.

As has been said so many times before: Verdana is a fine font for its
purpose (good readability at a given nominal point size); but throwing
it into a mix with other fonts in an author style sheet for body text,
in the absence of widespread support for some kind of font-size-adjust
correction, is really not a good idea.

There was a time when most users had displays of limited resolution
and display quality, and every gram of extra readability would have
been beneficial. I'd say that's no longer the case, added to which
there is ever increasing diversity in display situations. Trying to
find a single CSS display style which fits every situation is getting
less and less tenable, IMO.

Let readers select Verdana for themselves, at their preferred size, if
they feel they need it for body text. By all means propose fonts from
the author stylesheet for particular display texts, which are going to
be displayed large anyway and where readability is unlikely to be
critical, such as headings; but large areas of body text can get
uncomfortable to read in an unsuitable font/size combination.

Browsers install with a font/size which the vendor supposes to be
acceptable to most users, and can be adjusted by the user if it's
inappropriate - why, oh WHY, do so many document authors insist that
they know better about this, and that their own choice is meant to be
good - no matter what the resolution and quality of the display, and
the visual acuity of the reader?

And, again, that's before we start to consider the question of the
character repertoire supported by various fonts.

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