Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, 2nd ...

Chapter 6: FontsFigure 6-3 shows how various browsers render generic fonts. From the output shown in those figures,you can see that generic font rendering is not exactly identical between browsers and platforms. Fontsthat display consistently are serif, sans-serif, and monospace. Because of the wildly varying differencesin rendering of the fantasy and cursive fonts, designers seldom use these two fonts.In the notation for the font-family property documentation, refers to the possiblespecification of a generic font name. Often a generic font is included as a last fallback option, as shownin the following rule:p {}font-family: Arial, Shruti, Tahoma, Mangal, Helvetica, sans-serif;The addition of sans-serif to the end of the font list for the font-family property means that as a lastresort, if none of the other fonts specified are installed on the user’s computer, the generic sans-serif fontshould be used.Use the following Try It Out to experiment with the font-family property for yourself.Try It OutApplying the font-family PropertyExample 6-1. Follow these steps to experiment with the font-family property.1. Write the following markup in your text editor:font-familyThe font-family property allows you to specify afont face.It has the built-in ability of allowing you tospecify fallback fonts,fonts that are used when your first choice(or choices) aren’t installed on the end user’s OS.Even though, these days, because of the dominance of theWindows platform,cross-platform fonting is less of an issue.2. Save Example_6-1.html.173