The Scoorge of Dreamweaver

I see this CSS font stack declaration all the time font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;. But what exactly is the point? In fact there is absolutely no point in declaring Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif as all Apple products have Arial installed. So no one — except maybe some UNIX user who happens to not have Arial installed but does happen to have Helvetica installed, or maybe some Mac user who has deinstalled Arial — will ever see Helvetica. The correct declaration should be Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif.

This is Dreamweaver’s original default font stacks:

• Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Courier New, Courier, monospace
• Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

And yes, this is a riff on Mark Simonson’s The Scourge of Arial.