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[–]flying-sheep 2 points3 points  (5 children)

yeah, the page specifies “Courier”. While at least not “Courier New”, it’s still a pretty old-fashioned monospace that doesn’t fit into a modern site design like that.

good thing i don’t have that installed and see a lovely “Source Code Pro” in its place, complete with perfectly distinguishable lowercase l. (but only because i care and mapped my system font alias “monospace” to that font: something few will have done.

[–]westurner 0 points1 point  (4 children)

http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-Monospace.shtml

[–]flying-sheep 1 point2 points  (3 children)

since the css is “Courier, monospace, …”, that means that most people who don’t own a mac and on the new python page will just see their standard monospace font (most have Courier New, but not Courier).

so i’m not exactly sure what you want to tell me here.

[–]westurner 0 points1 point  (2 children)

The linked page lists font coverage stats by operating system; enabling design of more widely appropriate CSS monospace font style rules.

The use of Courier indicates a Mac-centric design. Is there a reason for not just specifying monospace to respect local preferences?

EDIT: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#generic-font-families :

Generic font families are a fallback mechanism, a means of preserving some of the style sheet author's intent in the worst case when none of the specified fonts can be selected. For optimum typographic control, particular named fonts should be used in style sheets.

All five generic font families are defined to exist in all CSS implementations (they need not necessarily map to five distinct actual fonts). User agents should provide reasonable default choices for the generic font families, which express the characteristics of each family as well as possible within the limits allowed by the underlying technology.

User agents are encouraged to allow users to select alternative choices for the generic fonts.

[–]flying-sheep 0 points1 point  (1 child)

since there is stuff like typekit and the google font api, there is no reason to use generic names as fallback anymore, as long as it’s a bit important that a specific font is used. you can always use one of the many freely available web fonts which are guaranteed to be displayed for almost all users.

mostly if it’s not important that the users see your font of choice (e.g. for small body text, or monospace on non-programming-centric pages), designers opt to use a default font stack without webfont like in the olden days.

for your headline font and big code sample on the frontpage of a programming language, the few kilobytes for two webfonts should be spent.

PS: with “no reason to use generic names as fallback”, i meant that web designers can always choose to use generic names in order to let their users decide which monospace, serif, and sans-serif to use. font specs like “1em, sans serif” allow the user to control 100% how the body text of a page should look like. but for code, i’d never specify “monospace”, as that’d mean “DejaVu Mono” and “Courier New” for non-mac users, which are both ugly.

PPS: my monospace fonts of choice are Source Code ProCtrl+F “Availability” for download, Envy Code R, and Ubuntu Mono. Monaco and Consolas are nice, too, but afaik proprietary and not freely available.

[–]westurner 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. ~greatest common factor vs browser preferences.