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Originally Posted by Rev. Bob
Mark your calendars, folks…
I have to agree with JSWolf on this one. David, you’re simply wrong.
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Of course, as you are agreeing with JSWolf, you must be agreeing about ePub 2.
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The CSS Fonts specification defines five generic “fallback” fonts, and every compliant rendering engine is expected to support them. These are serif, sans-serif, cursive, monospace, and fantasy. This is precisely why a well-crafted CSS font declaration will always end with one of those five values; it translates to, “if you can’t find anything else I’ve listed, use the default for this type of text.” Quoting from the spec, section 3.1.1:
“Must.” As in, not “may” or “should.” It isn’t optional. Any user agent which does not do this does not comply with the specification and is therefore in error.
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Any particular reason you didn't include the last sentence of that paragraph? To quote it all (with my highlighting):
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All five generic font families must always result in at least one matched font face, for all CSS implementations. However, the generics may be composite faces (with different typefaces based on such things as the Unicode range of the character, the language of the containing element, user preferences and system settings, among others). They are also not guaranteed to always be different from each other.
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That last sentence seems to say that if the renderer only wants to use one actual font for all five faces, they can. And I don't even read the first paragraph as saying the renderer must use a monospace font, just that it provide something. And the very next paragraph is:
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User agents should provide reasonable default choices for the generic font families, which express the characteristics of each family as well as possible, within the limits allowed by the underlying technology.
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A "should", not "must". And that last sentence really just lets them do whatever they want.
And back to my comment about ePub 2. The CSS standard that uses is a lot vaguer about this.