is there any standard choice of the font family and font size for a general web site .. or something of that kind which are normally used...
+1
A:
Not really, although you'll get a good feel for what is generally used if you spent some time on the internet.
There is always a problem (when using fonts online) that your user may not have the font. This is why the font-family lets you provide multiple fonts. Here is a helpful list of fonts that exist on Windows and Mac OS. As of CSS3 we have @font-face which lets us use fonts that we provide.
David Johnstone
2010-03-18 06:29:07
+1
A:
Well, there is no standard for fonts at all, except for the generic fonts defined in CSS.
Helvetica is a font that is available on most systems. Use the generic font sans-serif as fallback. Arial is the Microsoft equivalent of Helvetica.
The size is a little tricker as it can vary somewhat between implementations of a font, but 14px normally gives you the same size as this text.
body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size 14px; }
Guffa
2010-03-18 06:30:22
Helvetica and Arial are actually unrelated (even if they look alike). Arial was based on Monotype Grotesque, and custom made for IBM. True, it's microsoft that made it popular by shipping it as part of Windows 3.1; But i'm just being font-geeky here :)
sthg
2010-03-18 06:36:52
@sthg: Thanks for the clarification. Even if Arial is not really a clone, it's the best bet to get a Helvetica-like font on a Windows system. If there is a Helvetica font, there is some risk that it's a screen font, which looks horrible when scaled to size.
Guffa
2010-03-18 07:03:30
A:
Well there is no general guideline on which font to use on a website it is always best to use web friendly fonts which are defined on WikiPedia as
Web-safe fonts are fonts likely to be present on a wide range of computer systems, and used by web content authors to increase the likelihood that content will be displayed in their chosen font. If a visitor to a website does not have the specified font, their browser will attempt to select a similar alternative, based on the author-specified fallback fonts and generic families.
You will find more here
asarfraz
2010-03-18 07:15:43