Mike Foskett's response to another thread referred to http://www.websemantics.co.uk/tutorials/useful_css_snippets/#leveller that applies the equivalent of the subject rule to body of a stylesheet designed to get rid of most UA default styles.
I'm wondering how many people who use this rule have any real clue of its ramifications on non-M$ systems. On M$ systems, Helvetica is usually mapped to Arial. Because Arial is scalable, the difference between the two specified fonts isn't particularly large. On OS X among Macs at least, Helvetica is apparently scalable as well, so again there won't be much apparent difference. However, Helvetica on Linux seems traditionally to be a bitmapped font. This in a not insignificant number of cases will result in rendering results quite a bit different from what was probably the intended result of the fallback font, since most Linux systems are not equipped with Verdana. http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/verdvhelve.html provides a look at Helvetica and Verdana together on 2 Mac & 4 Linux browsers. http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/auth/Font/font-verd-v-helve.html is the foundation of the screenshots there, though most were taken using a modified version that resorted according to approximate size. I say approximate largely because Helvetica is frequently taller, but normally narrower than Verdana. Since Geneva seems to be preferred to Helvetica on Mac, and Helvetica usually doesn't exist on M$, is there any good reason to ever specify Helvetica as a fallback font, or even as a first choice? -- "If you love your children, you will be prompt to discipline them." Proverbs 13:24 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/auth/ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
