Transitional serif / Didone serif
Baskerville is transitional: refined but readable. Didot and Bodoni are Didone: heavy stems, hairline strokes, and sharper drama.
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What it is
Transitional and Didone are stages in the historical shift from old-style serifs toward modern ones. Transitional faces such as the one John Baskerville cut in Birmingham in the 1750s have a more upright stress, sharper serifs, and stronger thick-thin contrast than Garamond, but keep some bracketing and moderation. Didones, named for Firmin Didot in Paris and Giambattista Bodoni in Parma around 1800, push the recipe to vertical stress, heavy stems, hairline strokes, and flat unbracketed serifs.
Reach for a transitional serif when long reading needs polish without too much theater. Reach for a Didone when the type is large and the contrast itself is the image: the Vogue and Harper's Bazaar mastheads are the reference, along with luxury packaging and formal editorial display.
Gotcha: Didone hairlines are size-sensitive. At small sizes or on weak printing, thin strokes can disappear while heavy stems remain, making the text sparkle or break apart. Classification is also historical, not a CSS feature; selecting 'serif' does not tell a browser which genre you wanted.
Ask AI for it
Build a side-by-side type specimen using Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts as the transitional serif and Bodoni Moda from Google Fonts as the Didone. Load both with '@font-face' or the Google Fonts CSS API, and set the same word at 96px with CSS 'font-family', weight 400, and identical tracking. Add callouts for stroke contrast, stress, serif bracketing, and hairline thickness. Set a paragraph beneath each at 16px so the Didone's fragile hairlines and the transitional face's reading texture can be compared. Do not simulate either face with 'font-weight' or transforms.