Something that I can blindly follow when making the first draft of a site.

Anyone want to share a link to such a thing?

But I will try to put together a simple list of standard fonts and how to optimize them for the best results. Will shoot you an email when it's done.

Maybe you should also consider posting it? It seems like many people would appreciate it here!

That's a great resource. It also highlights the futility of specifying alternate font families. I couldn't find any font family combination that looked good side by side using the same size, leading, tracking, etc.

Here are my suggestions:

    sans: "font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;"
    serif: "font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"
    mono: "font-family: 'Courier New', Monaco, monospace;"

    "Consolas", "Menlo", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace

EDIT: I believe there is a large population of folks that don't like ClearType hinted fonts. Consolas looks absolutely horrible unless you have ClearType on and tuned. I can't speak to Consolas on any Linux-based OS as I've never tried it.

It's common knowledge that Helvetica is a better font than Arial, plain and simple. The issue is just that Arial is somehow optimized for screen display (hinting or whatever), whereas most or many Helvetica versions aren't. At least, that's my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong.

I've always suspected you could get around this handicap this way:

font-family:"Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

That is, only use Helvetica if they've got the updated version Adobe has put out, otherwise prefer Arial. I know Helvetica Neue technically was created before the rise of the web, but for some reason I expect it would render better. I've never had a PC that had the font installed though, so I've been unable to test this.

Otherwise it becomes unbearable to read at standard body font size 11-13pt. See here http://trevordavis.net/play/helvetica/

Unfortunately for windows users, they don't get the pre-loaded collection and because the font isn't free, most people settle for downloading either one version/style as demo-copy or modified version of it. This is problematic because the CSS still recognizes that you have Helvetica and doesn't fall back to Arial.

Typekit is the solution to that if you're willing to pay. I doubt open libraries will ever carry Helvetica. It costs too much. :P

That said, yes world, please don't use Helvetica for body font, most people don't even have a good version of the font, and plenty of renderers butcher its kerning, anti-aliasing (especially with versions of the font without good hints, or with renderers that ignore them), and even its baseline.