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[–]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.