Web Typography (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on web typography. Covers CSS font properties, web-safe fonts, Microsoft’s Core Fonts for the Web (1996–2002), the CSS font-family fallback mechanism, the five generic font families, web font history (@font-face in CSS2, EOT, WOFF, Google Fonts 2010), Unicode fonts, and pre-web-font alternatives (image replacement, Flash/sIFR, JavaScript VML/SVG).
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Media: Two images (Web fonts.svg diagram; “3 Core Fonts for the Web.png” showing Arial, Georgia, Verdana) — both on Wikimedia Commons; not downloaded, consistent with all Wikipedia ingestions.
Key points
- Web-safe fonts and the Core Fonts for the Web historical context (Microsoft, 1996–2002, established Arial/Georgia/Verdana/etc. as de facto web fonts).
- The font stack fallback mechanism: a comma-separated priority list where the browser tries each font in order.
- Five generic font families as last-resort fallbacks (sans-serif, serif, monospace, cursive, fantasy).
- Web fonts (@font-face / Google Fonts, launched 2010, 800+ families, majority of sites by 2016) as the mechanism for full typographic freedom, at a performance cost.
- Image replacement, now obsolete due to web fonts, as an anti-pattern: unselectable, inaccessible, SEO-damaging, and bandwidth-heavy.