What a terrible rule! Kind of defeats the whole purpose! In the majority of my pages, I use the exact same font family throughout and declare it in the body selector! No wonder I'm having so many problems! If I have to declare the family every time I use font shorthand, I'm not saving much in the way of code or keystrokes! I think I won't be bothering with font shorthand in the future!

Sorry, Karinne - please don't take that as shooting the messenger - I appreciate the help and the clarification, but I have to wonder what genius made that rule?!

I find it amusing that IE supports font shorthand even without the font family declaration. As much as IE gets bashed (and I do so as often as anyone), how ironic that their non-compliance turns out to be a superior method!