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The validator reports a warning "font-family: You are encouraged to offer a generic family as a last alternative" despite the fact that you have used a generic family in every font specification. As a test, I ran the validator across a document whose *entire* CSS content consisted solely of: <style type="text/css"> body { font: 10pt Helvetica, sans-serif normal; } </style> Even this produces the warning. Note: this matches bug 818, which for some reason was closed as "invalid" even though it is apparently quite valid and easy to reproduce.
As far as I can tell from http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-shorthand the "font" shorthand does not allow to use the variant after the font-family. Hence font: 10pt Helvetica, sans-serif normal; is being parsed as if "sans-serif normal" were a font-family, which is *not* a generic family.
Reason for closing bug are invalid. Tried to send details, but the email reply address is not working. Please supply valid email address so I can pass that info along.
Re: Comment #2: if it's not possible to follow-up on this bug directly on the bug tracking system (which would be preferred, for consistency), an alternative is the (public) mailinglist for the CSS validator - www-validator-css@w3.org
FWIW, I agree with Olivier.
Initial reporter Mark sent me other examples... While the generic font-family parsing issue is not altogether clear, it appears that the parsing of the font shorthand property is sometimes wrong, and often inconsistent. I am changing the title of this bug from: Warns to use generic font-family despite having done so to incorrect / inconsistent parsing of 'font' property and raising priority/severity accordingly. For reports specifically related to the font-family property, its parsing and the warning about generic font-family, we still have bug #818. Mark, could you send your examples here, or is it OK if I do it?
FWIW, I think 'font' parsing is known to be broken...
Fixed, see http://qa-dev.w3.org:8001/css-validator/