Elements of Style - HTML Manual of Style - page 129

are encouraged to place a generic font family name as the last fallback choice.
Most browsers recognize the generic font family names listed in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1: Font families recognized by most browsers

Family Name Properties Examples

sans-serif Proportional, without

serifs

Helvetica, Arial, Geneva,
Verdana, Tahoma

serif Proportional, with serifs Times, Times New Roman,

Georgia, Bookman Old Style

monospace Fixed-width; code or

typewriter style

Courier, Courier New,
Monaco, Andale Mono

cursive Curved strokes;

handwriting style

Comic Sans MS, Lucida
Handwriting

fantasy Anything unusual Papyrus, Klingon

To test your browser's styling of these generic font families, copy the code
shown in Example 3.4 into the body of an HTML ile or anywhere else you can
enter HTML code to create a page you can display. Figure 3.4 shows how this
code rendered in my browser.

Example 3.4: HTML code for displaying generic font families

<p style="font-size: 14pt">
<span style="font-family:sans-serif"> sans-serif &mdash;
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz </span><br/>
<span style="font-family:serif"> serif &mdash;
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz </span><br/>
<span style="font-family:monospace"> monospace &mdash;
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz </span><br/>
<span style="font-family:cursive"> cursive &mdash;
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz </span><br/>
<span style="font-family:fantasy"> fantasy &mdash;
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz </span>
</p>