Just a terrible article. "Arial and Helvetica are the default font stack for most browsers and for most of the websites. That's bad, really really bad. Ari

Just a terrible article. "Arial and Helvetica are the default font stack for most browsers and for most of the websites. That's bad, really really bad. Arial and Helvetica suck on web and for paragraphs of text - they are quiet *(sic)* unreadable (as compared to many other typefaces created specifically for web). And Helvetica looks ugly without proper kerning and Arial is just an ugly bastard son of Helvetica." This is wildly ignorant linkbait. Whether or not Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica or not is irrelevant to his argument. They're both excellent body fonts, and the versions on your computer have had countless man hours spent on hinting them perfectly for the screen. "Helvetica Neue was recreated for web." Nope. It was created in 1983, as a more consistent type family. [1] Okay, this bit is brilliant in it's ignorance: **"So Why do People Use Them?"** "Prevalent reason is ignorance. People just don't care/know about design - let alone typography." This is jaw-droppingly misinformed. They're beautifully neutral typefaces that work very well across tons of different situations. There's a reason that font-family: 'sans-serif' defaults to Arial and Helvetica. To suggest that someone building a website doesn't make a conscious decision about one of the most important choices in their design is highly unlikely "Second reason, which makes most sense, is availability[1]. Arial is available almost everywhere (~99% Macs and Windows machines have it)." Now this is the one spot-on point. This has classically been a very, very good reason to use one of the canonical web-safe fonts. "Safe bet and cross-platform compatibility - Arial was created in image of Helvetica. They are very much same in terms of x-height and other measurements. So they are the safest thing to do! Different x-height can break your layout! It's easy to work with defaults no matter how bad they are." I suppose that's dependant on your design, but it shouldn't be so reliant on x-height as to actually break it. If you're using a custom font, you should really make sure you have a web-safe font in your font stack, and that your site works well with it. "They like it. (Gulp!) Well however much I'd like to say "to each; his own" - still there are good things from mad. Justin Bieber can never be compared to Tony Bennett - he is just not that good technically no matter what poplar taste is. Arial is shit and Helvetica hardly works as good on web." Well, I suppose there's no accounting for taste. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_.281983.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_.28198...