Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 05/06/06 20:51

On Sat, 6 May 2006, ironcorona brings to light that:

> Albert Wiersch wrote:
>
> > Yes, I'm aware of that... but my question is about "web-safe"
> > fonts. I'd like to know which specific fonts are considered "safe"
> > to use (will work for 90% or more of visitors).

That criterion of "safe" is complete and utter nonsense.

It can be completely safe to include in the list a font which only a
minority will have: the rest will harmlessly ignore it.

It can be significantly harmful to include in the list a font which
almost everyone has - and I'm not talking about the Verdana problem -
rather, I'm talking about the character repertoire issue, and the fact
that readers with earlier versions of the font may be missing some of
the characters which the author supposes it to contain. If I recall
right, "Arial Black" is one particular example of such a risky font,
but I'm sure there are plenty more. And hard to research if you don't
possess vanilla copies of all of the OSes in question.

> > I listed some and wanted to know if I missed
> > any or included any that might not be "safe".

My opinion is that the idea as currently described is fundamentally
misconceived.

> As far as I can remember times new roman and trebuchet aren't
> default fonts for linux boxes. Possibly verdana too. Which would
> make them non-web safe.

The concept of "web safe font" as set out here is frankly useless and
perverse.

It might be useful to spell-check the names against a list. And to
make sure that authors aren't making silly errors like putting generic
font names in quotes, or (what I've actually seen) coding "san-serif"
instead of sans-serif. Hardly anyone has a font named san-serif.

But don't go too far: "Monospace" (in quotes) is the name of an actual
font family - monospace (without quotes) specifies a CSS generic font
family.

--

Please back up a step in your thinking, and figure out why you need to
know this. Then keep backing up until you no longer need it. That's
the only solution here. -- Randal Schwartz

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