font-weight: 300 considered harmful

Many modern web pages set font-weight: 300 in their stylesheets. For the DejaVu Sans font I prefer, this will result in the text being very thin and light and difficult to read, and for some reason the system will use the "DejaVu Sans ExtraLight" (200 in thickness) variant instead.

Why do people set font-weight: 300 ? Probably a Mac user. On my macOS Catalina computer, see the difference between 400 and 300 by default built-in fonts.

I won't blame the designer for using 300 thickness in some cases. In fact, 11 years ago I posted a code snippet called "Best Helvetica" which mentioned this:

 <code>body { font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-weight: 300; }</code>

But for Tomáš, his default font is DejaVu Sans (the default font for many Linux and Android systems), which is difficult to read when the font is so thin. Part of the problem is that if the alternate font happens to be less than 300 thickness, the specification states that it can fall back to 100, if needed. I believe the professional terminology of this is very, very detailed .

I will try to avoid this myself (or use it when I load a web font that I know has 300 thickness), but if this bothers you on many websites, check out Tomáš's article to learn how to fix this on your computer. This actually reminds me of different fix levels.

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