Beyond Times and Arial - The New Web Safe Fonts

In the past, when you created a website or web app, you were largely limited to a few select “web safe” fonts such as Times and Arial. If you deviated from these fonts, you were required to use Adobe Flash or your embed text in images, which introduced a whole new set of trade offs.

For example, images aren’t semantic, cannot be translated into other languages automatically, and can be much larger in file size than text. In addition, text in images cannot be copied to a user’s clipboard, read with screen-reading software or easily indexed by search engines.



http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/beyond-times-and-arial-new-web-safe.html