“Chone” is not actually his first name. It’s his middle name. Actually, not even that. It’s a shortened version of his middle name. His full name is Desmond DeChone Figgins. That makes the spelling of “Chone” marginally less perverse, since it sort of suggests a French theme with the “de”.

Good Don is here to post pictures.

Evil Don is here to drop a deuce in your microwave when you step out back for a smoke.

at least, for me it’s faster. Consistency and speed are both good things… unfortunately, they seem to have come with some really strange side effects…

oh wait, I’m on AN, not Lookout Landing…

I mean +1.

I couldn’t remember if there was a circumflex on “même” but I was in a hurry and didn’t want to look it up. So I tried to come up with the etymology. I couldn’t think of any Latin root, but I thought of “mismo” in Spanish. Circumflexes in French almost always indicate a dropped consonant (usually “s”) so hey presto, there’s the answer.

it’s just a Tribble in a Halloween costume.

I don’t think it should be up to me to specify either. Here’s what I don’t get: On your CSS it says:

font-family:Arial,Helvetica,FreeSans,sans-serif;

For the uninitiated, that means it will first try Arial*, then if it can’t find Arial it will try Helvetica, then if it can’t find Helvetica it will try FreeSans, and then if it can’t find FreeSans it will use whatever the local browser has set as the default sans-serif font.

But what is the default sans-serif font on most browsers? Arial or Helvetica!

There is nothing useful to be gained by making a list of fonts which begins with Arial/Helvetica and ends with sans-serif. What is the difference between your list of four and simply saying “sans-serif” alone? The 90% of users who have Arial/Helvetica as their default will get it regardless. And the few users who don’t have Arial/Helvetica at all (if such a user even exists) will get their default regardless. The only people affected by your list are the ones who have deliberately changed their sans-serif default to something other than Arial/Helvetica, and your list expressly subverts their intention. So all you have accomplished is to deny the preference of those users who have expressed a preference, while doing nothing for those who have not.

So my short answer is I think you should just say “sans-serif” in your style sheet and not specify a typeface at all.

(I’m not locked into sans serif either. If you’re truly doing a whole redesign and if that ends up switching to serif, I’d have no problem with that. But again, I’d recommend leaving it to the browser’s default.)

If for some reason you feel you absolutely must lock in a specific typestyle — in order to exert control over your look or whatever (I think that is contrary to the true philosophy of HTML, but I also understand that the Web is no longer the ideal world it was envisioned as) — then I recommend you choose a typeface that was explicitly designed for ease of reading text on a screen. For example, any of the three in Microsoft’s 1996 release (Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet), or the six from Microsoft’s 2007 release (Calibri, Cambria, Corbel, Candara, Constantia, Consolas).

* (We’ve been discussing Helvetica here, but in fact most of us are seeing Arial. The two typefaces are very similar but not identical. Arial was designed in imitation of Helvetica, and the only difference likely to be spotted by a non-type-geek is the right leg of the capital R. I tend to use the two names interchangeably, which isn’t quite accurate.)

(laughs at HH weak attempts at fan blogging)

(um, what’s our totals?)