Typeface selection in CSS

Hypothesis:
There are two, and only two, appropriate ways to do this in CSS.

font-family: serif;

font-family: sans-serif;

Discuss.



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.

There are a set of fonts that are "likely" to be found on a useful
proportion of Windows systems. These are no improvement over the
defaults and aren't worth selecting.

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.

There is no other way to select a font, given the vagaries of the set
locally installed. Fighting to choose Trebuchet over Verdana is of
negligible aesthetic benefit, causes more trouble with sizing
differences than it solves, and still ignores the non-Windows users.
Century Schoolbook may well be a better choice than Times Roman for
solid blocks of body text, but even that level of choice is rarely
workable.

Embedded fonts are problematic.

So as the only practical decision available to the web designer is
serifs or not, that's all they should attempt to choose. Leave the rest
to the local system and its defaults.

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.



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.

There are a set of fonts that are "likely" to be found on a useful
proportion of Windows systems. These are no improvement over the
defaults and aren't worth selecting.

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.

There is no other way to select a font, given the vagaries of the set
locally installed. Fighting to choose Trebuchet over Verdana is of
negligible aesthetic benefit, causes more trouble with sizing
differences than it solves, and still ignores the non-Windows users.
Century Schoolbook may well be a better choice than Times Roman for
solid blocks of body text, but even that level of choice is rarely
workable.

Embedded fonts are problematic.

So as the only practical decision available to the web designer is
serifs or not, that's all they should attempt to choose. Leave the rest
to the local system and its defaults.

Is it enough to say "I disagree with the last paragraph", or should I
also use arguments to sustain my opinion?

--
Els http://locusmeus.com/
Sonhos vem. Sonhos vão. O resto é imperfeito.
- Renato Russo -

"Toby Inkster" <usenet200504 (AT) tobyinkster (DOT) co.uk> skrev i meddelandet
newsan.2005.06.04.14.42.46.385694 (AT) tobyinkster (DOT) co.uk...

Andy Dingley wrote:
____
[1] Though it has been estimated that within 10 years, over half of the
world's population will speak English. (Obviously not as a first language
in most of the cases!)

How many people will speak Chinese as first language in 10 years?


--
Luigi ( un italiano che vive in Svezia)
https://www.scaiecat-spa-gigi.com/it/svezia.html

On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 15:42:47 +0100, Toby Inkster
<usenet200504 (AT) tobyinkster (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

What about "monospace"?

Fair point - add monospace.

I skipped cursive because I'm not even sure if that has any reasonable
expectation of default support, beyond the simply illegible.

The naming of specific fonts in the "font-family" property won't work for
all of the people, all of the time, but the same can be said of:

The examples you cite have extensive value, and a quite reasonable
expectation of support. Even JavaScript is usually there, quite robust
if it is, and can add much value to a page. Requiring a page to be
minimally useful without it isn;t the same as saying it's so broken we
may as well not bother.

My point here is that the only choice you can make with any real
expectation of success is to suggest Trebuchet or Verdana as
alternatives to Arial, and have these accepted by most of the users.
However they add almost nothing to the page (they're poor fonts anyway,
and they're practically indistinguishable from Arial for most users).

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

On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:45:51 +0100, Toby Inkster
<usenet200504 (AT) tobyinkster (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

So about 93% of people will notice if you use "font-family: Verdana". I
would class that as a "quite reasonable expectation of support".

Read my last paragraph.

It's likely to be supported, just not a useful font to choose.

On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Toby Inkster wrote:

According to Codestyle's survey, "Verdana" is installed on 94% of Windows
systems, 92% of Mac systems and 53% of Unix systems.

So the problem explored at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html
is even *more* prevalent than I assumed.

That gives us yet more reason *not* to specify Verdana in an author
stylesheet.

I'm sure it's a perfectly fine choice for an individual to make in the
privacy of their own browser, and at a size of their choosing (as long
as misguided authors don't go and overrule it...)

I'm talking basically about body text here, mind you.

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell (AT) ph (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

That gives us yet more reason *not* to specify Verdana in an author
stylesheet.

I'm sure it's a perfectly fine choice for an individual to make in the
privacy of their own browser, and at a size of their choosing

User setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.
Author setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.
Result: Verdana reduced in size by a factor 2xY = microfont.

The same thing but somewhat less drastic happens when using most other
sans serif fonts as the user font.

To avoid this, specifying a sans serif font as the user preferred font
should be accompanied with a browser minimum font size setting equal to
what the user wants to see as the body font size.

This in turn prevents non body text from being displayed at a reduced
size which results in losing the ability to de-emphasize text. For
example I like my body text displayed in Verdana @ 13px, but I can
comfortably read Verdana down to 10px. Due to the necessary minimum font
size setting of 13px I see content that has appropriately been sized
down at the bigger size of 13px. This makes it harder to distinguish
body text from for example side bar/panel content.

Many find TNR and most other serif fonts not pleasant to read on screen
@ the typical body text size. I'm sympathetic to authors who want to
suggest a sans serif font for their sites for the many users that don't
change the default font in their browsers. Some suggest that authors
should not do that and that they should instead show the user how to
change the font locally. This I consider bad advice, a IE user cannot
specify a minimum font size.

--
Spartanicus

On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 19:55:59 GMT, Spartanicus
<invalid (AT) invalid (DOT) invalid> wrote:

User setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.
Author setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.
Result: Verdana reduced in size by a factor 2xY = microfont.

Actually, y^2 not 2y. 80% of 80% is 64%.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"I feel a wave of morning sickness coming on, and I want to
be standing on your mother's grave when it hits."

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Spartanicus wrote:

I'm sure it's a perfectly fine choice for an individual to make in the
privacy of their own browser, and at a size of their choosing

User setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.

Sorry, that doesn't rhyme. The user's choice is the user's choice.
It isn't "reduced" by anything. Sure: it's likely to be a smaller
choice than they would have made if they'd used some other font. But
it's still their choice.

Author setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.

User's defence: the minimum font size setting (in a good browser), or
the "ignore author font settings" in the operating system component
that thinks it's a web browser.

Result: author loses essentially *all* the control that they were
trying so hard to impose.

Result: Verdana reduced in size by a factor 2xY = microfont.

(On the basis of what you were hypothesising, that would be Y*Y,
actually.)

Many find TNR and most other serif fonts not pleasant to read on
screen @ the typical body text size.

Things are slowly improving. Some years back we could confidently say
that although, on a nicely printed page, serif fonts were acknowledged
to be better, nevertheless on a computer screen the greater
readability of sans fonts at low resolution meant that they were the
natural choice for screen display.

But considerable improvements have been made both in display
resolution and in rendering technology, so it's undergoing a
changeover, the way that it seems to me.

[...]

This I consider bad advice, a IE user cannot
specify a minimum font size.

Tools> Internet Options> General> Accessibility

[/] "Ignore font sizes specified on web pages"

(Various other options available there.)

Now I can confidently sit back and wait for the usual chorus of
"IE users never change anything".

The puzzle is this. Those folks keep claiming that IE users browse in
fullscreen mode, but I've never seen an IE installation that wasn't
windowed at installation time. If IE users really *do* never change
anything, as they keep claiming, then clearly that can never happen.