It's more important that you use a font designed for digital display for body text. For example, don't use Helvetica at small sizes (since this is a font designed for print), and instead use Verdana, which is designed specifically for digital display and is very legible even at small sizes. Similarly, opt for Georgia over Times New Roman. Of course, make sure you structure your style-sheets so to accomodate users who don't have these fonts still get a half-decent font instead. But Verdana and Georgia are fairly universal now.
Have a look at the front page of the Washington Post, then look at Globe & Mail. The two are almost 180s of each other in terms of font usage, yet both are effective (and both use primarily Georgia and Verdana as their first choice). WP uses sans serif for titles, links, opinion piece text, bylines, and captions; it uses serif only for the body of news story bodies. G&M uses serif for titles, links, bylines, opinion pieces, and sans-serif for news story bodies and a couple other small-text applications.
Which just further illustrates that there are few accepted rules.
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