One generally wants one’s website to be as accessible to as many people as possible. Therefore one should specify a list of font families to ensure that your website “degrades” gracefully if the users PC does not have your favourite fonts. For example, we would probably specify a list such as:
font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, Verdana, sans-serif;
For the lowest common denominator, there are only a few generic font families. See www.w3.org’s discussion of generic-font-families IE:
- cursive
- fantasy
- monospace
- sans-serif
- serif
However one could also add in commonly held fonts – the “safe list”. See webdesign.about.com for a comparison of these fonts. Note that Microsoft and Macintosh have different names, so one would specify a name for each.
- Arial
- Arial Black
- Comic Sans MS
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Impact
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
Do not despair however, there are still many different stylings (the size, weight, style, colour, lineheight etc) that one can apply to the fonts to achieve a specific look. Try http://typetester.maratz.com/ to experiment. Please remember the following:
- sans serif fonts are easier to read
- sizing should be a “relative” specification and can be changed by the user (sometimes they need to do so)
- colour may be irrelevant to the user (colour blind?)
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