Which system font? There’s no standards here; each operating system has their ow...

mananaysiempre · 2025-07-26T14:52:24 1753541544

Partly, the answer is “tough”. As a designer, you don’t and aren’t meant to have pixel-level control over the screen contents. Web is not print. Don’t ask for the PostScript standard fourteen. (Somehow this lesson comes through much better for reflowable ebooks.)

Partly, I am willing to admit that web fonts are still nice when you can get them. But they’re too unwieldy to block on (slow connections exist; font foundries are assholes[1]; etc.), and we don’t really have a solution (the problem with FOUC is not the unstyled content, it’s the layout shift).

[1] https://jakearchibald.com/2021/f1-perf-part-1/

luckylion · 2025-07-26T15:29:14 1753543754

While I'm absolutely not a design-should-rule-all person, I think there's quite a range between "pixel-level control" and "you can't choose which font to use".

If we'd reliably have the top 50 google fonts on every OS, there'd be a lot less webfonts used.

yencabulator · 2025-07-29T17:01:03 1753808463

This is also something the browser vendor could provide, without OS-level changes.

mrec · 2025-07-26T14:54:48 1753541688

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family :

    system-ui

    Glyphs are taken from the default user interface font
    on a given platform. Because typographic traditions vary
    widely across the world, this generic is provided for 
    typefaces that don't map cleanly into the other generics.

reaperducer · 2025-07-26T15:20:51 1753543251

Which system font? There’s no standards here;

Yes, there is:

   font-family: system-ui;