It would be great if web browsers had a way to actually indicate the user's preference of typeface, but what we've actually got is the browser's preference, and the browsers almost all have chosen really terrible default typefaces. It's fine to say "just use the default" for Mac users who get a decent default, but then the poor windows users have to suffer through some terrible serif.
The users who actually know how to change the default font also know how to use stylish.
When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you.
Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd.
Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.
Most people have the means to cook for themselves without going anywhere and do so at least the vast majority of the time. Even if you do go to a restaurant, they almost always have menus rather than just making one dish for everyone since some people have styles of cooking that they prefer or don't like. People rarely design their own font but rather pick from professionally designed fonts. Additionally, at restaurants people pay for food so incentives are aligned while on the web people generally don't pay for content and any design professional involved is likely an advertiser. I rarely read stuff on the web for a design experience but for the content. I suspect most people would be unhappy with a newspaper that changed fonts for every story or a book that changed fonts every chapter.
Personally, I've been setting my browser to use only DejaVu fonts with a 16pt minimum for years (maybe a decade now) and every time I briefly use a default browser profile I notice the fonts and think not just "this is bad" but "how can people live like this?". Even with the usually minor issues that often appear, setting my own fonts is a way better experience than not doing so. My default experience is much closer to Firefox reader mode than it is to what the page specifies in most cases.
IMO, font speicification should be limited to serif, sans-serif, or monospace and let the user or browser set the actual font. Desingers should not rely on exact sizes of fonts or use custom icon fonts.
Can you elaborate on why/how they suck? Do you have example links, to set a common ground for the conversation?
I think most fonts that get your attention suck, the best ones are invisible and get you directly to the meaning of text, without getting in the way. So maybe there's a kind of bias (selection or sampling bias?) operating here?
I can’t speak for the parent poster, but, yes, back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Back then, I told my browser “I don’t care what font they tell you to use, just render it with Verdana”.
These days, people either use their social network’s unchangeable CSS, or they use a Wordpress theme with an attractive and perfectly readable font. Even Merriweather, which I personally don’t care for, is easy enough to read.
The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money:
Edit It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.
> back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere.
Indeed, typography is a skill. Most designers should have it though, which is why I asked more information to OP.
> The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money
Ah, the infamous Comic Sans. It's a shame because as a typeface on its own, in its category, it is pretty good. Sadly, it's misused all the time in contexts where it's not appropriate at all.
> It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.
Without more details we cannot guess. You're right: a lot of things can go wrong and ruin a typeface, regardless of how the characters are designed. Anti-protip: a reliable way to make any font look like shit is to keep the character drawings as they are and mess up the tracking (letter-spacing) and kerning.
I think one of the reasons Comic Sans got such a bad rep is because it was one of the relatively few available fonts back in the pre-woff “web safe fonts” era of a decade ago. Microsoft should had given us a more general purpose font, such as a nice looking slab serif to fill the gap between the somewhat old-fashioned looking Georgia and the very stylized Trebuchet MS font.
Because they they are not the single system default sans-serif and single system default sans-serif-monospace fonts that all websites MUST use, period, no discussion. As you put it:
> fonts that get your attention suck
If I can tell the difference between your font and the system default font, your font sucks; if I can't tell the difference, what's the damned point?
Well, if it makes you feel any better, my website renders just fine on Lynx (no Javascript nor webfonts needed to render the page), complete with me putting section headings in '==Section heading name==', which is only visible in browsers without CSS. Browsers with modern CSS support see the section headings as a larger semibold sans-serif, to contrast with the serif font for body text. [1]
[1] There are some rendering issues with Dillo, with made the mistake of trying to support CSS without going all the way, making sure that http://acid2.acidtests.org renders a smiley face, but even here I made sure the site still can be read.
[2] Also, no cookies used on my website. No ads, no third party fonts, no third party javascript, no tracking cookies, nothing. The economic model is that my website helps me get consulting gigs.
[3] I do agree with the general gist of what you’re trying to say: HTML, Javascript, and CSS have become too complicated for anything but the most highly funded of web browsers to render correctly. Both Opera and Microsoft have given up with trying to make a modern standards compliant browser, because the standards are constantly updating.
> Well, if it makes you feel any better, my website renders just fine on Lynx
It doesn't; I only use lynx when someone tricks apt-get into updating part of my graphics stack (xorg, video dirvers, window manager, etc) and researh is needed to figure out how to forcibly downgrade it, and then only because I can't use a proper browser without a working graphics stack.
> the general gist of what you're trying to say: HTML, Javascript, and CSS have become too complicated for anything but the most highly funded of web browsers to render correctly.
This is subtly but critically wrong; I am saying that it is necessary than web browsers do not render websites 'correctly'. The correct behaviour is to actively refuse to let websites specify hideous fonts, snoop on user viewing activity, or execute arbitrary malware on the local machine.
> Browsers with modern CSS support see [...] the serif font for body text.
Fair nitpick - "haven't noticed the difference yet" would be more accurate - but I don't see how that changes the argument; if I haven't noticed a difference, what's the point?
The trouble is that the defaults tend not to be the best fonts that are available, and very few users change them. I have changed them myself, but I don’t know of anyone else that has.
For myself, I wish that people would leave Arial, Verdana, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, &c. out of their sans-serif stack, having only their one preferred font and sans-serif, or better still sans-serif alone; but as a developer I understand exactly why they do it all.
Unfortunately, I'm one of those developers :( My font stack is:
font-family: system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
for prose and
font-family: ui-monospaced, Menlo, monospace;
for monospaced text. The first being the user's preferred font, the second as a good (IMO?) default that I impose on them, and the third as a full fallback. I'm conflicted on whether this is the right balance between user choice and handling browsers that support nothing.
