Fonts for web design: a primer

This article provides a useful guide to all the fonts commonly available across platforms, which are therefore appropriate for use on web sites by designers.

( Read the article )

Looks like you've got a bit of a problem with the figures in this article. They don't seem to match the fonts described in the captions.

Also, it's worth reminding everybody how bad helvetica looks in Windows. I'd link to a screenshot, but I uninstalled it a while ago.

Verdana is *not* a good choice for interoperability! For some obscure reason, verdana is somewhat larger at any given point size, wherefore systems without this font, when falling back to another sans-serif font, will often display text at a nearly unintelligable size...

"(...) Helvetica, which is also common on Linux. However, its lack of penetration on Windows means it’s best suited placed in the penultimate position (...)"
I don't think penetration should be the deciding factor in how you order your fonts. If anything, the least-common fonts should come first, and the most-common ones should serve as a fallback. If I have both Arial and Helvetica installed, which one do you want me to use?

Although, there is one problem with that thought when it comes to the Microsoft Vista C-fonts, which have the potential to look horrible if ClearType is not enabled. If a site specifies "font-family: Calibri, Arial", users without ClearType but with PowerPoint Viewer 2007 will not have a nice experience. But if the site specifies "font-family: Arial, Calibri", then everyone just sees Arial. The only way around that is "font-family: sans-serif", and let Windows XP show Arial and Vista show Calibri. (At least, I think that's what happens.)