On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 04:10:14PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Richard Grevers dramatic@xtra.co.nz): On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 14:31:52 -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com wrote:
- Article text should be in high-contrast colors that are not so
overly loud they induce eye strain, and serifed fonts are preferred for readability.
<Klaxon sound> From my personal experience I strongly disagree with this. I side with the various research studies which show that whilst serifed fonts provide better readability on paper, sans-serif is more readable on screen. In addition, typefances with metrics that depart considerably from the norm (such as verdana) are best avoided. (My personal favourite is Trebuchet, which I use for nearly everything).
Perhaps the best solution is that font-family preference should be left entirely to the user?
The user will always be free to have his browser substitute his own stylesheets. If a Sans font is clean and readable on screen, that's good too--that particular point is a suggestion, not a firm requirement. Trebuchet is nice--do you know if there's any free equivalent? I tend to use Lucida fonts myself which are easy to find, but I think Bitstream recently donated some more modern ones to the public we might want to look into. I certainly don't want us to standardize on anything that only looks good on Windows machines.
Personally choosing a font, or relying on one, is universally considered a Bad Idea(tm). If you want a sans font, fine - specify that you want a sans font in the stylesheet. Forcing a particular font is just a bad idea - usually the UA will know which font is best.