Setting CSS font-family to a safe handwriting font

Similar to sans-serif there is a generic cursive that it a "font that resembles handwriting". This will vary by browser (as will sans-serif) but could be a good place to start.

Here is a survey of script family fonts installed per user (year 2012):

Cursive font sampler and survey results

They all look significantly different from each other so you'd lose some consistency, but some are quite widely adopted.

Their main installed fonts are (FOR WINDOWS ONLY):

Comic Sans MS       99.13%  
Monotype Corsiva    82.29%  
Bradley Hand ITC    63.02% 
Tempus Sans ITC     62.68% 
French Script MT    62.39%

There is no handwriting font that would be reliably available in most browsers across all platforms. There are subsets like the fonts that come with Windows Vista or 7 but if you want to achieve any serious reliable coverage, it's likely that you'll have to resort to delivering the font alongside the web page - which, sadly, makes things complicated.

Related SO questions:

• How to add some non standard font to website?

• How to use our custom font on our website

• Fonts on the Web

You could use one of the Google web safe fonts: http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Schoolbell&subset=latin#code

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Schoolbell&v1" rel="stylesheet">

h1 {
    font-family: 'Schoolbell', arial, serif; 
}