The essentials of CSS and HTML as web standards opened new doors for web designers but also forced them to adapt their thinking. A case in point is fonts.

In web terms there are few fonts which are recognised by all browser/operating system combinations. Split into font families these are:

Serif: Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, New Century Schoolbook.
Sans-Serif: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Trebuchet.
Monospace: Courier, Courier New.
Cursive: Comic Sans, Zapf Chancery, Coronet.
Fantasy: Impact, Western, Papyrus.

Controlling fonts online is not easy since each browser has got a different default font; the best way to declare fonts is in cascading style sheets (css).

It is always good not to declare just one font type

body {font-family: Times;},

In case the browser doesn’t have a default font as the chosen font.

Instead use multiple font decoration:

body {font-family: Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, New Century Schoolbook;}

In this way you ensure that if the first font is not available the browser will choose a latter one and your design will look as you intended.

We can force css to use a font that is not in the list of fonts for the web. But other browsers might not support the same font and the result would be a different work flow from our design. To be safe always use the fonts for web.

Keep in mind:
- font with the same decoration should relate to the same font family;
- size and spacing could have a different visual effect even if the fonts are from the same font family.

Source: Lynda.com