I've been writing "font-family: sans-serif" when I wanted user preferred font without serifs and "monospace" for user preferred monospace font. Is that not the correct way?
The web is backwards. Designers and web site operators spend ridiculous amounts of engineering trying to control what users see, with the limitation that they have no control (other than exclusion) over what software the users chooses to view the content.<p>HTML went way too far IMO, trying not only to represent the structure of information, but ALSO trying to solve the layout problem.<p>It will never happen, but I long for a web where layout and content are disassociated. Where content is structured, requested by clients, delivered by servers, and then the client chooses the layout. Blind? Terminal only? Compute limited? No problem, use an agent that works for you.<p>But big content wants CONTROL. They want to control what you see, how you see it, and what the preconditions are. They also want the web to be an application platform (that they can control, of course, and not have to deal with Apple or Google or Microsoft) that is free to them and supports all their controls.<p><rant/>
There is the system font that you can use:<p>font-family: 'system-ui', sans-serif;<p>System fonts and font rendering are now so good for readability, that you don't need anything else. I use it on one website where I don't care about pixel-perfect. In cases where the customer/owner wants a pixel-perfect layout, this will not work.
There really should be a set of a few hundred fonts standardized by the w3c or whatwg that should come with every browser (and OS) install.<p>This would be like how early versions of PostScript came with about 30 standard fonts available to all PostScript printers.
Kind of ironic that the heading font takes enough time to load that there is a flash and the layout shifts around.<p>I have long decided to skip web fonts altogether and go with a) Georgia and b) a fallback font stack that suggests a couple of similar alternatives that are common across operating systems and falls back to standard defaults.
The whole point of a font stack is to give a prioritised selection between beautiful modern fonts that won't be available on every machine and basic standard defaults like 'sans-serif' that will.