Font family (HTML)

In HTML and XHTML, a font face or font family is the typeface that will be applied by a web browser to some text. The font is relevant for the display of text on the screen, on a printer or another device.

A font family and other presentational attribute of a font may be applied in HTML code in either cascading style sheets (CSS) or the deprecated HTML  element.

In CSS, a font-family (or face in HTML) in fact consists of a set of related fonts, grouped as font families. For example, the Times family includes different font sizes, styles (like roman and italic) and weight (like regular and bold).

The web browser will only be able to apply a font if it is available to it, which is not always the case. HTML code writers may list in preferential order font families to use when rendering text. The font list is separated by commas (as shown above). To avoid unexpected results, the last font family on the font list will be one of the five generic families which are by default always available in HTML and CSS. In the absence of a font being found, the web browser will use its default font, which may be a user defined one. Depending on the web browser, a user can in fact override the font defined by the code writer. This may be for personal taste reasons, but may also be because of some physical limitation of the user - such as the need for a larger font size, or the avoiding of certain colours.

Generic fonts
The font-family can use a specific named font (like Heisei Mincho W9) but the result depends on the installed fonts in the user machine. Font names must be quoted if containing whitespace. The actual appearance will depend on your browser and the fonts installed on your system. A default installation of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, for instance, always displays serif and Times as Times New Roman, and sans-serif and Helvetica as Arial.