How many times have you noticed that a web page displays with Sans-Serif fonts on Windows or Mac and Serif fonts on Linux?
I see this more often than I would like - and it bugs me. If you view the stylesheets of such websites, in most cases this is due to the improper use of fonts like Verdana, Helvetica and the likes, that may not be available in a normal Linux installation.
The complete definition of font-family style in CSS is as follows:
font-family: [[family-name|generic-family]
[,family-name|generic-family]*] | inherit
The solution is that, whenever a font family is specified, its generic version must follow. For example:
body { font-family: "Gill Sans Extrabold", Helvetica, sans-serif }
.receipt { font-family: Courier, "Lucida Console", monospace }
This will make sure that all browsers display the intended - or at least the closest to the intended - fonts.
There’s a neat example at Mozilla Developer Center.
With the number of Linux users increasing, QA folks should consider testing their websites on Linux too.