Comic Sans was An alternative history... 4298

Gene,

While I do use the Internet a lot, I also spend a comparable amount of time actually IMPLEMENTING applications on it. No, I don't mean using Front Page or some such tool, but actually writing client code that talks through a sockets connection to distant servers via the backbone.

You have obviously never read any of the RFCs (acronym for "Request For Comments", hardly a hard and fast standard) or actually written any Internet-capable software. Just the RFCs that directly affected the last application I wrote (an NNTP client) was a 2 inch thick stack. Often there are CONFLICTING requirements therein, etc. Being a Windows application, I had the dual requirements of having to work with the sparsest possible Windows install working with other fully compliant Internet users (who cares what happens when the other end is NOT compliant).

Another poster listed his Linux setup, where he specified what the proportional font was, etc. The point is that he only specified what fonts to use when the font was *NOT* otherwise specified in his HTML as in text postings. BTW You can specify "fall back" fonts to use in HTML, and Windows also maps a large number of unsupplied fonts onto the ones you have.

HTML is just awful, requiring fonts to be specified by name rather than by characteristics. Of course, the things that users like about various fonts don't even have recognized characteristic names that address what is good or bad about them. There is an RFC somewhere that suggests a minimal set of 4 fonts, e.g. "Times Roman" that uSoft then maps to "New Times Roman". Again, the casual suggestions in the RFCs is as close as you will ever get to a "standard".

However, the sad fact is that much of what Internet browsers do is NOT specified in the RFCs, and is hence implied by indirect requirements and what other browsers do. Note how IE intentionally did crazy things on non-spec output from Netscape's composer to impair this compebreastion. Hence, Microsoft's 10 web fonts gets paired down to only 4 that enjoy wide compatibility.

The chains of logic that lead from the poor wording in some of the RFCs to the actual implementation of software of often quite obtuse. Further, there are often "holes" to exploit. For example, I needed a newsgroup to use to automatically distribute short binary updates, which could NOT coexist with long binaries because many NNTP servers have problems if you abort a download when you discover that you don't want it. There were no such NGs and my request to form a new one was refused. I then simply notified them that I would use existing NGs to post my updates and explained how I would do this. They said that they would simply delete my postings as spam. I further explained my methodology and how it effortlessly evaded spam detection and asked them just how they were going to do this. That was the end of THAT discussion and my binary update postings are making it out just fine on existing NGs. Eventually they will probably give me a NG just to get rid of my postings.

In short, people's final conclusions about what the RFCs actually say are often pieced together from fragments coming from several RFCs and are often not well thought out.

Some of the absurd postings here saying that a particular installation lacks something (like Comic Sans) as though their installation were a gold standard are the people to whom your opening remark SHOULD be addressed. I, like Microsoft and Netscape, go by the RFCs. That we all mis details should come as no surprise to anyone.

Gene, stand away from the mirror and move over to your PC.

All of the above having been said, I could reasonably have specified a list of fonts to use in my HTML, with Comic Sans being at the far end of the list.

Now, I just need to know about some SUITABLE replacement fonts, that have similar readability for the visually impaired and similar separation between characters to support that readability. For all of the objections to Comic Sans, NO ONE has suggested specific other better fonts that addresses the problems I was addressing with Comic Sans. I can then present these to be selected if one of these non-standard fonts happens to be on a particular target machine. Of course, I will STILL draw flack here from those users who do have Comic Sans and don't have any of the other listed fonts. In short, it is absolutely impossible to please everyone here.

Steve Richfie1d