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.)

> Leaving something that fundamental to the browser simply strikes me as an exceedingly poor choice.

...But that's the point of the WWW. You don't know what resolution or browser or OS the user has. You don't know if they even have a screen.

I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.

    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.