I use Arial which is safe because it is generally available on both Macs and Windows PCs. Currently, it appears to me, there are two divergent fashions in Website design. The first is to sites that have extremely sophisticated and stylized graphics. This is a screen shot from Iberia, Spain's national airline. The second fashion, appears to be for sites, like this one, which take a minimalist approach.
Speed is a major benefit.
Small text is very fashionable. I use Javascript very sparingly in non critical situations where it won't matter if someone has it turned off. This site uses cascading style sheets for formating the text.