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Comment by Filligree | Hacker News Reader

Which system font? There’s no standards here; each operating system has their own, with no guarantees as to what is available.

Until OS developers get their house in order, designers will keep on ignoring them.

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Partly, the answer is “tough”. As a designer, you don’t and aren’t meant to have pixel-level control over the screen contents. Web is not print. Don’t ask for the PostScript standard fourteen. (Somehow this lesson comes through much better for reflowable ebooks.)

Partly, I am willing to admit that web fonts are still nice when you can get them. But they’re too unwieldy to block on (slow connections exist; font foundries are assholes[1]; etc.), and we don’t really have a solution (the problem with FOUC is not the unstyled content, it’s the layout shift).

[1] https://jakearchibald.com/2021/f1-perf-part-1/

While I'm absolutely not a design-should-rule-all person, I think there's quite a range between "pixel-level control" and "you can't choose which font to use".

If we'd reliably have the top 50 google fonts on every OS, there'd be a lot less webfonts used.

This is also something the browser vendor could provide, without OS-level changes.

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family :

    system-ui

    Glyphs are taken from the default user interface font
    on a given platform. Because typographic traditions vary
    widely across the world, this generic is provided for 
    typefaces that don't map cleanly into the other generics.

Which system font? There’s no standards here;

Yes, there is:

   font-family: system-ui;

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