determining font displayed with generic font family

[Bob Long]

Hi. Does anyone know how a browser determines which font to display when
presented with a generic family in a style sheet?

I finally got around to upgrading to IE 5.5 and now all of the pages on
our site (with style, font-family: sans-serif) are displaying in
Trebuchet MS. The previous version of IE didn't do this. The web-page font
is set to Times New Roman, so that doesn't seem to have any bearing on it.

I've never encountered this before. All other IE installations I've seen
seem to default to Arial as the generic sans-serif font.

Note: This is occuring on my machine only. It's not a style-sheet problem.
It just happened when I installed 5.5.

Bob Long, Eastern Shore Regional Library, Inc.
Automation Technical Assistant
410 479 0776	(v)
410 548 5807	(f)
bob at esrl.lib.md.us