Helvetica or Arial as base font in CSS?

Question

One of my friend told me "Use font family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif in your website", when I asked him why then "blank" he don't know, some usability expert in his company told him this thing.

But when I tried helvetica, arial, sans-serif then I noticed that I bold and un-bold is not working properly with this font whereas I use arial, helvetica, sans-serif this then its working fine. note the difference here: http://hell.meiert.org/core/html/helvetica-arial.html

I googled on this, but nowhere seen anything much convincing to me. Then I SO'd and found a post Is Helvetica a browser base font?

So I want to ask that why Helvetica is recommended, and in the same post one of answers says "If you want Helvetica, you either have to get a Mac" So is the MAC PC's are the only reason to use this so that it will look good in MAC only?

In my site when I am using "arial..." as base font then → html character is rendering well in all browsers but when using "Helvetica..." then its not displaying properly in google chrome, Why?

Thanks

Answer 1

On the question of why one is recommended over the other, from the research I've done it seems Helvetica is the superior font family. It should always be used when it exists, so thats why you want to put it first in the list. For almost all the slight differences, Helvetica is more aestetically pleasing. Yes, it is usally just found on Macs.

http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html

http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html

http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/06/arial-versus-helvetica/

Answer 2

The machine you were running on did not have a bold-face for Helvetica, but it did have one for Arial.