I think the better question is, why specify fonts at all?

I set fonts in my browser. When browsing any site that simply leaves fonts alone, everything looks the way I want it to! When sites tinker with the font used by most text, it is unnecessarily hard to fix (e.g. my style sheet has to list all kinds of HTML tags where text may appear and include lots of "!important" flags).

I can understand setting a fancy font for the odd title or something, but all the text on the page? Why?

For what it's worth, this is my entire override stylesheet for HN, including some tweaks to the home page that I think make it substantially more readable. I recommend trying it. :)

  html {
      overflow-y: scroll;
  }
  
  body, p, table, th, td, a, .comment {
      font-family: "Helvetica Neue" !important;
      font-size: normal;
      padding: 0.2em;
  }
  
  .subtext {
      width: 100%;
  
      padding-left: 40%;
  
      padding-bottom: 0.6em;
      border-bottom: solid #ccc 0.1em !important;
  }

Because the default font for most browsers (Times [New Roman]) looks ugly and the number of people who customizes their own styles is abysmally low.

Your fontconfig install should really take care of this for you locally without HN needing to change anything. You shouldn't need to install mscorefonts either since there are reasonable free alternatives.

It is a valid point, though. Others have had the same issue. It would be better to use families that worked in most major linux distros in the last few years without tweaking.

Mentioned by daleharvey almost 2 years ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229637

Related discussion from then: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229006

Totally agree that there isn't a good reason to specify Verdana instead of a more universal font family. But even if you get HN to fix this up, there will remain many other sites with similar odd choices.

So it's easier to insulate yourself from the issue instead, with a proper fontconfig setup. I'd have thought most recent distro's come configured to avoid this issue completely. If not, it's pretty simple to configure your system to substitute a font of your choice in all these cases.

This is a pretty simple fix in CSS using font face fallbacks. Here's a typical example:

  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Maybe pg or friends will update it.

Maybe take out the HTML Table tags too so the pages can be viewed properly on mobile devices.

I've been using "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Verdana", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif as my list. Seems to do what I want.

Is that in order? I tend to use Helvetica first so Mac users don't have to endure Arial, then I add , my fallback for Linux, then Arial, then whatever crap your browser uses as a default (I assume it's crap but hope it isn't).

In that order. I don't do Hel first because Linux historically has a broken Hel. Mac users often have DejaVu, Bitstream Vera, or Verdana installed anyhow.

OSX users are such a small minority, its hard to find a way to please them without making it worse for Windows and Linux.

That, and I've viewed my website in Safari on OSX, it looks correct (although, like everything on OSX, it has hard to read fuzzy fonts).

"OSX users are such a small minority, its hard to find a way to please them without making it worse for Windows and Linux."

There are many more OSX users than Linux on the desktop.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201011-201111

Except I collect website stats on my sites. OSX users are the smallest minority.

My favorite thing about it is that uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" look different (the former has serifs).