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An answer this very smart person drew was that there's not sufficient data to back statements about legibility

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...

That said, I as a news designer I believe there to be conventional reasons for using, for example, sans serifs for headlines and serifs for large blocks of body text.

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Great article, thanks for the link. I like how the conclusion is that it basically doesn't matter, but by all means use what seems to be the preferred choice for the target audience and/or aesthetic considerations.

By the way, what is it with all these people (in the comments) misspelling "Arial" as "Ariel"? They don't misspell any of the other fonts (ok I saw one person write "Veranda"), is it some kind of in-joke? Or is it people that don't have Arial installed and never see the word in their font listings? (in which case I'm not too sure on their opinions about it, particularly since it requires quite the expert eye to distinguish it from the beloved Helvetica)

Did you look at the typeface? Sure, regarding serif vs sans serif in general, but the "I" and "l" in this case are pretty damn different.

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