Far as I'm concerned, even in the days of 72dpi monitors--when a pixel was not simply a unit of measurement but a physical thing--serif fonts were more readable than sans-serif at normal sizes.

There's a number of studies that say one thing and an equal number which say another. However, in testing this myself, I find there is no difference in reader comprehension either way. Somewhere else I ran across several reports which said the same as I tested, no difference.

Use what you like, just don't mix it up too much!

ie. body text serif, headers sans serif or
body sans, headers serif or
both are sans or
both are serif

Definitely serif fonts for most people.

The one catch is that if you say serif, you pretty much have to name a font--any font--because there still exist computers whose serif default is some member of the Times Roman family, which is a pretty atrocious font for readability.

It's an awful shame that font-size-adjust [w3.org] hasn't been more widely adopted. I think only Firefox recognizes it, even though it dates back to CSS 2.1.

Well I load custom fonts for all mobile and that's where 80% of my traffic usually comes from.

I'm considering doing the same for desktop, but I may just let desktop die its slow, inevitable death and not bother with it.

What serif fonts do you recommend?

Georgta

I'm personally fond* of Palatino. In the early Mac days I really liked New York, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside. (I think it never existed as anything but a bitmapped screen font. There was a whole slew of city-name fonts: Geneva, Venice and so on, all now superseded by something in TrueType.)


* My fingers typed “font of”. This is really true.

As far as sans serif, I used to like verdana and still have it some places on my personal site. The tails on g, y, q, etc look nicer than most others.

So you vouch for how well these look on mobile screens?

Open Sans has a nice clean look to it.