Why do many popular online publications use serif fonts for body text, even though this is bad form?

Question

Design

Hello!
For example:
www.theguardian.com
www.bloomberg.com
the text is unreadable and many web design books say so: it is bad to use a serif font for body text, because. when reading from the screen, it is difficult to read.

Answer 1

These web design books that do not recommend serif fonts were written at least 5-8 years ago and earlier, and at that time there were no "retina" screens and the most popular screen resolution was 1024x768. At the same time, it was fashionable to draw three-column sites, and in order to fit at least some content there, the main text had to be made 10-14px in size.
At these sizes (and even without anti-aliasing), serif fonts looked dirty and strained the eyes.
Now it is considered good practice to make the size of the body text at least 16px. At 16px and up and with sub-pixel anti-aliasing, serif fonts look good, and at 20px, even better than sans-serif fonts.
Look at theguardian.com - the main font is 16px serif and the captions are 12px sans serif. bloomberg.com has a main font of 18px and small sans-serif texts.
In general, the recommendations from the books are already outdated because our screens have changed.

Answer 2

Как раз для основного текста они и сделаны - засечки позволяют вам лучше (быстрее, легче) читать длинный текст. Засечки как бы пол и потолок строки направляющие взгляд горизонтально и не позволяющие случайно перескакивать со строчки на строчку + буквы лучше различаются благодаря большему количеству деталей.
Это в теории. Сегодня больше к стилю относится - старое, надёжное, авторитетное, хипстерское - с засечками, современное, свободное, молодое - без засечек.

Answer 3

On print, long text with serifs reads better. The serif line is an additional guide that guides the eye along the line. True, the unexpected happened on the computer: even one pixel on one side and one on the other is a lot. In addition, many serif letters (for example, b, Zh, L) have flirtatious curves that also cannot be conveyed by pixels.
When sub-pixel rendering and high DPI reduced the proportion of serifs and straightened out the curves, and Korolkova and not only provided serif fonts optimized for the screen, they began to slowly use them.
As for me, anekdot.ru reads great on a retinoid tablet. And on a reader with 200 dpi, the best font is PT Serif. And on a desktop with ClearType forcibly disabled (well, I can’t digest it, at least in interfaces) it’s rather weak.
PS Especially for you, I turned on ClearType - it turned out pretty well on these two news sites.

Answer 4

No, this is not a different tone, it is difficult to perceive letters without serifs, and serifs, as it were, make the letters more recognizable, this is a classic, once upon a time everything was printed with these same serifs.

Answer 5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif
I can't stomach serif fonts myself.

Answer 6

Because 99.9% of readers don't care about serifs.

Answer 7

As in a joke about monkeys - it just happened here. Legacy of newspapers and books.