Verdana is certainly a very well-designed font for online reading.

My feelings are that we shouldn't specify a font for body-text reading at all.

And that we shouldn't specify font sizes at all, except in relative terms, but I know that would cause havoc with the design.

I'd probably put the whole thing into Papyrus.

Naturally. I might go for Times New Roman, which is familiar, but Verdana is fine.

Secret font shout-out to Mac users.

Verdana was specifically designed for web readability. It also works better than most fonts in small sizes.

Rob, snerk. How I miss Chicago. Not.

To expand on my point before, whether or not the font we chose is a good one, to have chosen a font at all takes away from full usability: the philosophy that the user can set the fonts (and font sizes) they like to use in the browser preferences.

How I miss Chicago. Not.

Well, this is the crappy, new Chicago. Not the cool, classic Chicago we use on the iPod. You can thank the Germans for that.

What do you dislike about it, DX? Surely there's no such thing as 'too readable'.

Too big, and I find it unattractive.

this is the crappy, new Chicago

It does look a bit blobby. Chicago in nine-point type looks like a completely different font, I recall.

You can thank the Germans for that.

Er, which, the good or the bad?

I don't like the upper-case "V" in verdana. It always looks like backslash-forwardslash to me.

We're deep into the realms of personal preferance here. (Oh, Lord, how porny did that sound when I typed it?) Given that, I think there's quite a case for the user-chooses argument.

Er, which, the good or the bad?

The bad. Some ergonmics agency in Germany has rules about fonts that the old Chicago violated. One of them caused them to change the flat bottoms on the V's and W's. But Chicago was designed to have such flat bottoms. It's a travesty.

Of course, Chicago was a non-ideal choice for iPod, but that's another issue entirely.