Holly Bostick wrote:So if you say that you want webpages generally to be displayed in sans-serif style, and then you choose Arial to be the sans serif font, your web pages will display in Arial. If you have also chosen Times New Roman as your serif font, you still won't see any Times New Roman-- unless you change the style of display to Serif, in which case you won't see any Arial, but only Times New Roman (except in those instances where a webpage has embedded a particular font and uses that instead).
I don't think it exactly works like this.
If a web page specifically uses font family "Arial" then Arial will be used, if present, no matter what your font settings are.
(This is of course assuming that you don't have the "Always use my fonts" box ticked.)
Well, that's kind of what I said, but I was trying to keep it relatively simple. If a web page specifically uses a font family, that is not really vastly different from embedding a specific font (since you may not actually have Arial, but a bunch of aliases aliasing Arial to Helvetica, in which case you'd see Helvetica). In any case, this is all pretty shoddy HTML coding in any case, and I didn't see so much need to discuss the intricacies of shoddy coding in a general explanation of the Mozilla/Firefox configuration dialog and what the various options were actually meant to effect.
If no font is specified by the website, it uses whatever you have chosen for your Proportional font (which as you point out is a "pointer" to one of the other choices).
Which is as it should be, imo. I've been to enough websites that actually offered a font download so you could "see the page as it was intended" (assuming I care about the artistic-ness of it all), and I find that kind of thing really annoying-- as I do embedded fonts in email. Not only does this behaviour take away my choice, and eat up my hard drive space, but it may even be a problem-- if I'm visually disabled, I may not even be able to read your cute little font (and sometimes even when I'm not-- what some people find readable truly eludes me at times). In any case, I'm interested in the information, not the "creative vision", and the best way to be sure that the information is readable for me (at this very literal level, nothing said about general site/page design), is to let me decide what font is used to display the page, since I know what font and size I find most comfortable to read, and the site creator does not. So why should that person get to decide? (They shouldn't, and they shouldn't code to force that decision on me.)
I don't think it is used much, but I think using font family "sans", "sans-serif", etc, is encouraged on websites, and if a website was to specify this, then the font you have chosen in that dialog would be substituted in.
Well, that's getting into CSS stylesheets, which are used quite a lot, and is *really* not the subject of this discussion ;-) .
Holly
Daniel
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