[Design] Fonts for the Web UI

[Matthew Eernisse]

I have an item on the feature-ranking matrix for Scooby 0.3 (Cosmo 0.5 
now I guess) that refers to fonts. There are visual guidelines posted 
here for Chandler:

http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/VisualGuidelines

This document specifies different fonts based on OS, which is a bit 
problematic for Scooby (i.e., Cosmo's Web UI) since what we have right 
now is pretty much just CSS (with a bit of variable interpolation, but 
that's essentially it).

I'm kind of reluctant to start cooking up OS-sniffing code to serve out 
specific stylesheets. That seems to me like a bad idea given how brittle 
that kind of stuff tends to be.

Hoping CSS font-fallback will save us is not really a viable option 
either, given that the same font may exist on multiple platforms, but 
look horrible on some:

http://www.badboy.ro/articles/2005-12-29/index.php

Is there any reason we can't just pick a universal Web-font like Verdana 
for the Web UI that we know will pretty much look good everywhere?

Any thoughts?


Matthew

p.s In any case I assume that eventually people will be able to save 
their desired font (or skin, whatever) in their personal preferences.