1. The point is that websites shouldnotspecifyafont.
2. The fullsize screenshots are nearly as ugly as the scaled-down versions. I searched for the text and the Wired article is rendered nicely without funky subpixels blurring everything for me (on Xfce/Opera, 1440x900). If the standard of font rendering on other devices is as bad as appears to be shown in the screenshots, this would be yet another reason not to worry about specific fonts but fix the rendering first.
> The point is that websites should not specify a font.
Seriously? One of the most important aspects of your design, and you want to leave it up to the browser? Web design is 95% typography. If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
> Seriously? One of the most important aspects of your design
Most websites need a lot less design than they have. There are properties that, for branding or other reasons, need to exert full control of their look and feel that need strong design, but most websites don't, and over-design gets in the way of disseminating information to users.
> If your website doesn't specify a font you aren't doing your job as a designer.
Not every website needs anyone doing a job as a designer. There certainly are very important places for design on the web, but the web as a whole is an information dissemination platform, not a full employment program for graphic designers.
You and I are using the same word, 'design', to mean two completely different things. To me, design is all about disseminating information to users. That's why designers should care so much about typography - readability is absolutely key to a good design.
I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'. It's very prevalent, and in most cases it's actually a great example of poor design.
> You and I are using the same word, 'design', to mean two completely different things.
I don't think we are. We just have different opinions about the need for it.
> To me, design is all about disseminating information to users.
Design is about presentation of information to users, not dissemination.
> That's why designers should care so much about typography - readability is absolutely key to a good design.
Readability is subjective and not essential to dissemination; design is about controlling presentation, rather than leaving it to system through which the user accesses the information. For information that doesn't have specialized presentation needs, this will make the presentation worse for people that have their defaults well tuned for themselves in the name of making it better-than-untuned-results (ideally) for the average user.
> I wish there were a good specific word for what you're referring to as 'design'.
Readability is not subjective. Small font sizes, low contrast, bad kerning, and many other things objectively decrease readability.
It sounds like you think the web should be a collection of RSS feeds and APIs. That's interesting and all, but that's not even remotely what the web is. The system through which the user accesses web information (aka browser) is only well-tuned for a very small minority of users, because the vast majority don't even know that they can tune their browser, let alone think that they should. Further, I've never seen a browser where the defaults make for excellent readability. In every case I've seen, they don't even make for acceptable readability.
> There is. "Design".
Appreciate the snark, but I was talking about a specific word for what I understood you to be talking about. Design is the exact opposite of a specific word. It's so general as to be downright vague. (Also, since you said you didn't think we were talking about different things, this comment really isn't useful.)
> Small font sizes, low contrast, bad kerning, and many other things objectively decrease readability.
There are elements of design which affect readability more consistently across individual users than other elements of design do, but that doesn't stop readability from being subjective.
I am not a designer, thankfully, or even more people would hate me.
I am fine with the usual serif, sans-serif, monospace etc. declarations, but I think that it should be left to the user/webbrowser to decide which particular serif font they prefer, as it is the user that has to read the text set in this font.
You will be surprised about how many people actually know that you can change your default fonts on browser. For normal non-nerd users, you make choice of good defaults.
And then you get a completely inconsistent viewing experience across browsers and operating systems. The whole point of having a designer work on content presentation is that they can actually know what type is appropriate for the content they're presenting. You're probably going to want to use different type depending on whether you're in a header, navigation, paragraph-heavy body copy, or bullet-point lists, because different type is more readable in those circumstances. The designer also needs to be considering things like how many characters per line are displayed, because it's much easier to read copy when there are 75-80 characters per line than when there are, e.g., 200. These are all things that the browser does not do for you. Sites like c2.com's wiki are what you get when you let the browser handle everything. That is not an optimal reading experience.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ‘inconsistent viewing experiences across browsers and operating systems’. Different operating systems are, by definition, different, and so are different browsers. Of course the ‘viewing experience’ will differ between Opera Mobile on a 4" Android device and Firefox on a 30" screen, and also between, say, Lynx and Firefox on the same screen. Differing viewing experiences are the only reason people choose different browsers.
And of course you want to use different type depending on whether you’re typesetting a header, navigation or paragraph. That’s what serif, sans-serif, monospace and even cursive and fantasy are for. You tell the browser which general family you would like to have in a particular place, and the browser/user then chooses the best family from this set depending on their device, font rendering settings etc. etc. (If you are seriously suggesting to use one serif type for the header, another serif type for the body and a third serif type for bullet point lists all on the same page I will have a hard time not trying to violate your physical integrity).
Furthermore, it is obviously important not to cram too many characters in a single line. However, if one font at a given size (which, again, you should only specify relatively to the browser’s default size) manages to fill a line with as little as fifty characters, another font will have a hard time filling that same line with considerably more than 70 – both of which are perfectly fine line lengths.
Again, I am not saying that CSS is evil and that you shouldn’t use it. I am saying that you should leave things to the browser that are best left to the browser.
I understand what you're saying, I simply disagree with you. Typography is the most important design decision that a content site makes. Leaving something that fundamental to the browser simply strikes me as an exceedingly poor choice.
(One minor point — type is much more than just font-family, as your second paragraph seems to assume.)
I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice
if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.
A recurring source of amusement (or frustration?) in the CIWA newsgroups back in the 90s was the young web designers whose questions began with "How do I force".
I never was able to determine if the decrease in the amount of these questions during the early 2000s was due to the decreasing popularity of Usenet or the increasing popularity of Flash.
2. Click on the screenshots to see them fullsize.