font-family Property

font-family determines how a font should be displayed. Instead of naming a specific font, as the tag does, the font-family CSS property instead sets the display characteristics of that font.

It can take any of the following values: cursive, fantasy, monospace, sans-serif and serif. One of the drawbacks of the tag is that you had to specify a particular font name (such as "Arial", "Times Roman" or "Courier") in order to try and get it to appear on screen. The font-family CSS property tries to get around this by specifying the type or "family" of font to be displayed. Given a particular value, the browser does its best to come up with a match, so if you specify monospace you may get a Courier font to appear on screen, whereas if you specify serif, you may get a Times Roman font instead. This CSS property is still dependent on the user's computer to come up with a matching font family, but the font family categories encompass a broad spectrum of fonts that could only be accomplished with a tag containing multiple values attached to the face attribute.

In other words, you could choose to include the following HTML code in order to get a serif font displayed on a user's screen:

This sentence is displayed in a serif font

Or you could use the following, more concise CSS code instead:

This sentence is displayed in a serif
font