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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

Core fonts don't necessarily equal good web typography. Arial, for instance, is pretty mediocre for the web. You could say the same about Helvetica (it is still better designed than Arial).

As for web fonts, Adobe and other foundries have large collections of gorgeous fonts specifically designed for the web.

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Helvetica on Windows is terrible, see https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/issues/42. This is because Helvetica comes from Linotype instead of Microsoft, and they care more about print than screens.

Arial might not be a good typeface, but as a font it's pretty damn well hinted for screens.

Except for Minion Web and Myriad, I haven't seen a really legible web font from Adobe that is usable at 11-15px. Heck, even Typekit uses Georgia/Arial for long copy.

Because Helvetica looks so bad on Windows, a good compromise for a CSS font stack is something like:

  font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif;

Helvetica Neue (a minor reworking of Helvetica from 1983) is a Mac system font, but few Windows PCs have it. So Mac users get nice fonts and everyone else gets Arial.

Many CSS font stacks list Helvetica after Arial, but that is silly because nearly all computers (like 98%) have Arial, so Helvetica will never be selected. :(

You could use just `font family: sans-serif` without any font name. Mac will default to Helvetica, Win to Arial

Mark Hurrell has blogged some of his testing on Helvetica font stacks (including Neue) at http://blog.mhurrell.co.uk/post/2946358183/updating-the-helv... which is worth a read. Current recommendation is to specify sans-serif but with additional specifications for Linux:

  font-family: Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif;

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