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.

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

For me, it's the "X" that bugs, among other things.

I dislike the i, but that may be the Ple/Pie confusion.

Ple, pie, it's all good.

Too big, and I find it unattractive.

I definitely agree that it's too big. It's not unattractive per se, though I think it's a little rough-looking. I think Ariel and Univers are more readable if you're going for a sans serif.

Anyhow, I like the idea of making the font user-definable -- either by defaulting to the user's browser preferences, or by adding the choice to the "set profile" page.

(And I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who's not in love with the font.)

I dislike the i, but that may be the Ple/Pie confusion.

Yep. This is the sort of reason why serif fonts come out easier to read for blocks of text.

fillip. jilli. And so on.

People will tell you over and over that sans-serif fonts are "easier to read", strangely. Mostly graphic designers though, and they tend to be not so much about the reading (I'm trying to be nice).

And it's scientific that the serifs make for readability. It's strange that people keep claiming the opposite.

I think what happened is between Netscape 2 and 3 it became possible to set the font face, which was always Times by default and everyone immediately changed theirs to a sans-serif, just to make a change, and ever since then it's been serif fonts old-fashioned, sans-serifs new.

IIRC, the argument goes that there's no doubt that serif is more readable for printed matter, where you have lots of resolution to ensure that the serifs are well defined, that's not the case when you are looking at the fonts on a screen, where the resolution is much lower.