> If it's not important, i.e. if you don't care about it.
No. I care about typography. You left out the critical part of this sentence: "it's not important if the default font is used".
Now I understand that you also say that default fonts are not necessarily well designed. On my side, these default fonts have looked good on every device I have used, and I'm more often annoyed by arbitrary font settings that look good to the designer who happened to design the web page I'm reading.
> The user is always in control. They can always choose what to load and what styles to apply
In practice, I'm not going to design each page I visit. I'm blocking web fonts by default, but that sometimes triggers a bad setting where the font that is used as a fallback looks very bad. I guess that happens when people assume that the web font will be loaded and don't default to (sans-)serif in their font-familly CSS property.
> "it's not important if the default font is used".
That's also what they said. They said "You may as well just do 'serif' or 'sans-serif' and be done with it."
> Now I understand that you also say that default fonts are not necessarily well designed.
While fonts are a matter of taste, objectively speaking fonts that comes preinstalled on systems often have very few weights and support only a very limited range of glyphs. They also lack features such as small caps, old-style numbers, etc.
Usually, though, the main, default sans-serif and/or UI font on the system are much better than some random font that just happens to be included in the system. So you will usually be better off using `sans-serif` than any of these font stacks.
> I guess that happens when people assume that the web font will be loaded and don't default to (sans-)serif in their font-familly CSS property.
But this is just yet another reason why using font stacks is bad...? If instead you just use `serif` or `sans-serif` it will follow the user's font preference.
No. I care about typography. You left out the critical part of this sentence: "it's not important if the default font is used".
Now I understand that you also say that default fonts are not necessarily well designed. On my side, these default fonts have looked good on every device I have used, and I'm more often annoyed by arbitrary font settings that look good to the designer who happened to design the web page I'm reading.
> The user is always in control. They can always choose what to load and what styles to apply
In practice, I'm not going to design each page I visit. I'm blocking web fonts by default, but that sometimes triggers a bad setting where the font that is used as a fallback looks very bad. I guess that happens when people assume that the web font will be loaded and don't default to (sans-)serif in their font-familly CSS property.