Jon -

I don't care much for Verdana on my browser, and generally use a Times-Roman (I have about 7 in this family) for default, but Verdana is one (or at least "emulates" some others that are) fairly commonly used font for "typewriter" correspondence in business offices.

Most of the older typefaces contained only the "ANSI Set" of characters, leaving some without accents and other diacriticals, and with limited "special symbols."

For Win2K and later, an attempt was made to provide some new fonts (sometimes with the same old names) with "full UNICODE" or "Augmented Latin" or "slightly extended" character sets, and Verdana happens to be one that was picked for an augmented set.

By using Verdana as a default anyone who corresponds with someone using lots of "furrin" (to US/common-English users) characters is a little less likely to see "unprintables" in the text. The more versatile/complete set of characters is likely the only reason that quite a few web sites use it - which is something one might not notice if your browser is set to substitute something else that you prefer.

Even Verdana is not commonly seen with a "full Unicode" character set. There are only a very few "full set" fonts available (that are "spec compliant"), and special acquisition, download, and install is required. A full set font is enormous and will slow down everything on your machine, so installing one is NOT RECOMMENDED for most people. Many of the Unicode characters cannot be used without additional "utilities" - as for example right-to-left text, vertical columns, and/or "composite character" constructs. The little "extras" can be hard to get (and/or expensive for individual users) so loading on marginally useful extras is not advised.

If you have a font (typeface) you prefer, that's the one you should use, unless/until you run into lots of "unknown char" characters when you go someplace where you like to be and/or be seen.

Knowing that Verdana is availabe, and how to flip it in place, can be handy if you do run into "broken font" displays. Also knowing whether your other "fonts" are augmented sets (contain more than basic char glyphs) is useful information occasionally in the same circumstances, since there is a lot of variation between different "same named" sets.

It's all very messy, and not really - for most - very important to know in too much detail.

John