I have always wondered what those were. Always thought they were ugly. Surely these only apply to certain types of printing. Why are they still shipped with fonts?
Serifs themselves are another example of this phenomenon. When the first "Sans Serifs" were produced, as part of the modernism movement (unlike post modernism, modernism is about stripping back decoration and reducing things to their pure functional nature) they were called "Grotesk", and the hacker news of the day widely panned them for being useless and illegible and stupid.
Now it's just boring and normal.
In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and what its attributes are.
It's a cheeky rebellion against art history. It's embracing the absurdity of our technological ignorance.
It's the teenager saying the word "LOL" out loud like it has no history or context.
Wow, that really highlights the ugliness of the "scaffolding" we use. Maybe we should design something better than HTML, so we can have scaffolding that we're not ashamed to show.
Fonts with ink traps for small point inkjet printing, and fonts without ink traps for everything else?
Serifs make it easier to identify individual letters. When you are new to an alphabet (ESL, learning latin-based lettering, or a child) having the serifs makes it easier to identify letters.
Serifs are also better than sans-serifs for reading in low lighting situations, or the holy grail of legibility: when the page you're reading is moving as much as you are (e.g. reading a newspaper on a bus/subway, reading a book on a train, etc)
Sans-serifs USED to be recommended for digital displays because digital displays had a much much lower resolution than print (72-96 dots per inch, compared to print resolution of 300 dots per inch) so that meant that on old personal computers serifs looked chunky and heavy. They weren't thin and elegant, and because of this the sans-serif fonts just looked 'cleaner'.
Fast forward to 2014 when the screens most people have in their pockets have 324+ dots per inch and are actually a higher resolution than much printed material. Does the rule still apply? I'm not so sure anymore…
"Sans serif is better for children learning to read"
Books produced for children are often printed with sans serif text as teachers claim that the simplicity of the letter shapes makes them more recognisable ( Coghill, 1980) , Walker, 2001 ). But studies with child participants have found no difference in their ability to read either style of typeface. ( Coghill, 1980) ; Zachrisson, 1965 , Walker, 2001 )
http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...