The main reason I suggested using Linux Libertine as the 'preferred' header
font instead of DejuVu Serif is that DejaVu Serif doesn't at all resemble
Georgia (the proprietary font the designers wanted). It's almost a
slab-serif font, which is very different from the book/antique serifs of
fonts like Georgia and Times. The designers wanted a classic,
"encyclopedic" looking font for the headers. DejaVu Serif is a workhorse
font, not a presentation/display font. It's appeal lies in its support for
thousands of Unicode characters, definitely not in its design (which is
frankly pretty awful). On pretty much any Linux system, specifying DejaVu
Serif in the CSS is going to be redundant anyway, since most of the popular
Linux installs fall back to DejaVu Serif as the default 'serif' font
anyway. Thus any characters that can't get rendered in the preferred fonts
will get rendered in DejaVu anyway.
When choosing the order of fonts in a CSS stack, you always put the
prettiest ones first, and the most widely installed ones last. In the
current case, we're doing it backwards.
I'm also open to using 'Nimbus Roman No9 L', which is more widely installed
than Linux Libertine, but a lot nicer to look at than DejaVu Serif. It's
basically a Times Roman replacement. Another option would be Liberation
Serif, which is pretty ugly, but still nicer than DejaVu Serif.
My preferred font-stack for the headers would be:
font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, "Nimbus Roman No9 L", serif;
Really though, the preferred font should be chosen by the designers, not by
a committee of developers, IMO.
Ryan Kaldari