CSS - Why do Chinese websites use English font-family

Question

I have worked on a couple of multi lingual website with both an English and Chinese version. I would always specify a Chinese CSS font-family for the Chinese version, and an English one for the English version. Makes sense right?

Example:

Chinese:

html body.chinese {
   font-family: '宋体',宋体b8b体,Microsoft YaHei, Arial, sans-serif
}

English:

html body {
   font-family: Arial,Helvetica,"Nimbus Sans L",sans-serif;
}

Then I noticed that my font didn't always display correctly in Chinese depending on the OS/browser, so I went to take a look at how some famous Chinese websites do it...

What I found out is that they don't specify Chinese font-families, but just English ones like Arial.

Take a look at baidu.com:

body {
   font: 12px arial;
}

Weibo.com:

body, button, input, select, textarea {
   font: 12px/1.125 Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
   _font-family: "SimSun";
}

1) Does anyone know why baidu does not specify a common Chinese font like SongTi?

2) And why does weibo to the same, but they add '_font-famly: "SimSun"' underneath their font declaration with a prepended underscore?

FYI: I used both English and Chinese computers/browsers to check and I'm located in China. It always displays like this.

Cellulitis

css properties with _ prefix is an old hack for old ie+windows versions. My guess from weibo's usage is that arial and helvetica probably has some fallback typefaces with chinese characters in modern operating systems and/or browsers. Old windows or ie versions may not have this fallback hence the underscore hack. – Syringomyelia

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about speculating on the reasons for coding decisions. – Matamoros

The reason why not specifying Chinese font is because the browser would fallback to default Chinese typeface like Heiti SC/TC or Songti SC/TC. Due to the big size of Chinese font, if you need Chinese typeface support, head to web font company like justfont.com or youziku.com. They offer a different typeface support compared to Google Font API. – Dogcart

Answer 1

I found a good guide about Chinese font-family definitions for CSS here: http://www.kendraschaefer.com/2012/06/chinese-standard-web-fonts-the-ultimate-guide-to-css-font-family-declarations-for-web-design-in-simplified-chinese/

Basically most websites just declare an English font and let the browser fallback to the default Chinese font for either serif (usually '宋体' aka SimSun) or sans-serif (usually SimHei).

Cellulitis