Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[Christian Montoya]

On 11/11/06, Felix Miata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On 2006/11/11 22:17 (GMT-0500) Christian Montoya apparently typed:

> Some users (like me) considered that 20 pixel font default a bug
> (because the scaling is sooo bad)

Please explain what you mean by bad scaling.


What I meant was that you can scale all of the native windows text
(menus, title bars, icons) to accommodate the laptop's ideal settings
(120 dpi, 1680x1050 pixels), but you can't scale the actual window
text of all apps. It's a big problem because at this "ideal" setting,
all the text is actually too small to comfortably read. So Internet
Explorer scales text, and Opera does too, as well as some Windows
apps, but Firefox doesn't, and neither do Java apps (which means jEdit
is a lot harder to use).

A lot of it has to do with the fact that while these computers come
with support for 120 dpi, they don't come with adequate support for
font-scaling to match 120 dpi at the maximum, factory-shipped display
setting. In the end, the 120 dpi, 1680x1050 screen is pretty, but also
pretty useless.


> and went about patching it; though
> it's still a little buggy.

What is "it", and how to you "patch" it?


Well, first step was to go down to 1280x800 pixels, and then install a
Dell patch to turn the poor image-scaling in IE off (which was
terribly pixelated), and then I know there are some more steps that
can be taken to stop font-scaling in IE and Opera altogether, but I
just decrease the zoom in them slightly and they look fine.


> Let's just say font-sizes are problematic on these 120 dpi screens;

It isn't about 120 DPI. It's about DPIs that vary more than a little
from whatever the page designer uses or assumes. Average DPIs have on
their way up for quite some time, and won't be stopping any time soon.


True, but considering how bad Windows XP handles 120 dpi, I'm not
about to put all the blame on the page designer.


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Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[Steve Olive]

On Sunday 12 November 2006 14:17, Christian Montoya wrote:
> 
>
> Let's just say font-sizes are problematic on these 120 dpi screens;
> and yes, I try to stick to Firefox for the consistent font sizing.
>

Most of the widescreen LCD monitors and laptops actually have 150 DPI, whilst 
most standard LCD screens are 96 DPI.

Most of the problems with LCD monitors are caused by users changing the screen 
resolution to make screen elements larger with "jaggies" instead of making 
the screen elements larger with high resolution clarity.

The problem is that many people haven't been taught to make screen elements 
larger - just how to change the resolution as they did on 14" & 15" CRT 
monitors.

Sorry, I just don't have a solution to teaching end users to zoom and use the 
built in accessibility or themes to make elements larger. Inconsistent 
zooming in applications and browsers doesn't help either.

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Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[Felix Miata]

On 2006/11/11 22:17 (GMT-0500) Christian Montoya apparently typed:

> Some users (like me) considered that 20 pixel font default a bug
> (because the scaling is sooo bad)

Please explain what you mean by bad scaling.

> and went about patching it; though
> it's still a little buggy.

What is "it", and how to you "patch" it?

> Let's just say font-sizes are problematic on these 120 dpi screens;

It isn't about 120 DPI. It's about DPIs that vary more than a little
from whatever the page designer uses or assumes. Average DPIs have on
their way up for quite some time, and won't be stopping any time soon.

It used to be that assumed DPI was substantially higher than real DPI.
That caused designers to think defaults too big, which most still do,
even though that assumption is now quite broken, particularly for those
using widescreen displays.

Check out the DPI realities on: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/dpi.html
and the impact on
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/auth/Font/fonts-pt2px-tabled.html .
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Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[Christian Montoya]

On 11/11/06, David Hucklesby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


One thing you need to be aware of, though, is people like me with high
resolution screens on our laptops likely have Windows set to 120 DPI.
This immediately creates a difference between point-based agents such
as IE and Opera, and pixel based ones like Firefox. Text size defaults
to 20 pixels on the point-based agents, 16 pixels on the rest.

But I do have to ask, "so what?"


Some users (like me) considered that 20 pixel font default a bug
(because the scaling is sooo bad) and went about patching it; though
it's still a little buggy.

Let's just say font-sizes are problematic on these 120 dpi screens;
and yes, I try to stick to Firefox for the consistent font sizing.

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Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[Kay Smoljak]

On 11/12/06, David Hucklesby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(Q. Does IE 7 resize pixel-sized text?)No. Font-sizing in IE7 does not apply to pixel-sized text and there are still only five settings (largest, larger, medium, smaller, smallest). BUT ctrl-scrollwheel - which used to change font-size settings - now  activates a zoom feature like Opera's which scales the entire page, images included. It moves in the opposite direction from text-size which threw me a little - scrolling down makes everything smaller, scrolling up makes everything bigger - but is still useful. Ctrl-0 resets zoom back to default like text-size in Firefox.
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Re: [WSG] Font-sizing in quirksmode

[David Hucklesby]

>> David McKinnon wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm trying to get font sizing consistent between IE6 and Firefox.
>>> Unfortunately our CMS writes two HTML comments before the DOCTYPE
>>> declaration on each page, throwing IE into quirksmode. This means
>>> that the default text is too large on IE and much too small on
>>> Firefox.
>>>
On Thu, 9 Nov 2006 22:53:59 -0500, Christian Montoya responded:
>
> I thought about this more and came up with a serious solution. Size the
> text with pixels, and then use conditional comments to give IE relative
> sizes. Pixel-sized text is mostly accessible on every other browser (and
> looks better too), while IE is the one that really needs relative (em)
> sizes. That would be the next best solution to actually removing the
> comments above the doctype.
>
I think that's a rather good solution, as far as it goes.

One thing you need to be aware of, though, is people like me with high
resolution screens on our laptops likely have Windows set to 120 DPI.
This immediately creates a difference between point-based agents such
as IE and Opera, and pixel based ones like Firefox. Text size defaults
to 20 pixels on the point-based agents, 16 pixels on the rest.

But I do have to ask, "so what?"

(Q. Does IE 7 resize pixel-sized text?)

Cordially,
David
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Re: [WSG] Synthetic speech is not only for the blind

[Christian Montoya]

On 11/11/06, Keryx webb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hello again all!

2. I was reading this article on Opera's new developer community:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/20/

1. (Yeah the order is right): I have been thinking about a way to listen to my
RSS-feeds on my MP3-player, while walking, jogging or driving.


They already have services that will convert entries in an RSS feed to
audio, and provide those audio files for download on things like
iPods.

RSS is easy to work with since it is a standard, XML(ish) format.
Unfortunately, if you can convert things with RSS, then you can still
serve your website with nonstandard table markup. It's like PDF
generation; you don't *need* markup that's clean and semantic, just an
expensive backend that will do all the work necessary to reformat the
content into a PDF.

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[WSG] Synthetic speech is not only for the blind

[Keryx webb]

Hello again all!

2. I was reading this article on Opera's new developer community:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/20/

1. (Yeah the order is right): I have been thinking about a way to listen to my 
RSS-feeds on my MP3-player, while walking, jogging or driving.


It seems to me that there will be an increased demand for synthetic speech from 
any website (or RSS-feed) for people like me who are not blind, but would like 
to listen anyway. If that is correct, doing things the accessible way will 
become even more beneficial.


Is that a selling point or not? I think it is!


Lars Gunther

P.S. This is my dream setup:

1. My computer downloads the RSS (and other content I want to listen to) and 
converts it to an tagged audio file.

2. I plug in my device and it's synced.
3. While listening I may - thanks to the tagging - skip parts or repeat parts 
logically. Not just through fast forward/backward.
4. Through pitch control I may listen at a higher speed to save time, while 
still hearing a normal voice.


Death to the MP3-player - long live the SMIL-player! Or what technique could be 
used to achieve this better?


Could this be improved? Well, if the portable player in fact was a 3G phone, and 
it would not cost me a fortune to download content directly. There are already 
phones that do synthetic speech on incoming SMS-messages.



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Re: [WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Hassan Schroeder]

Nick Roper wrote:

> At present we are using a variety of editors/platforms, but I'm looking
> to try and standardise. Are there any recommendations for cross-platform
> css/xhtml editors out there.

jEdit --  -- is the best editor I've ever used
and Java-based, hence cross-platform. My desktop dev machine runs
Linux, my laptop's a PowerBook, and I sometimes have to use Windows
at client locations -- and jEdit works great everywhere.

There's a Tidy plugin, but I don't know about the auto completion;
personally I don't use that kind of stuff. OTOH, jEdit is extensible
through macros and plugins, so it's probably worth a look.  :-)

-- 
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Re: [WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Tony Crockford]

Nick Roper wrote:

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I did wonder about running topstyle under 
crossover/wine on the Linux box. Don't think topstyle does 
code-collapsing though, which would be particularly handy sometimes in 
large xhtml docs.


Agreed, it's one thing that it doesn't do.  It does collapse CSS rules, 
if you turn it on in the options.


I've yet to find a CSS/XHTML editor that has all the frills I want and 
is also cross OS...


PSPad comes close, but I'm still using Topstyle rather than make the 
switch and it's windows only...


I really liked the look of this:
http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/

for the Mac, but it's Mac only, and one OSX upgrade away from being able 
to try it out on my Mac Mini!



have you tried SciTE ?
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Scintilla and SciTE

with a bit of effort you might get it running on all three OS, but I'm 
not sure it has all the bells and whistles you're after.


hoping someone has some better answers.

;o)



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Re: [WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Nick Fitzsimons]

On 11 Nov 2006, at 12:53:49, Nick Roper wrote:


Hi List,

At present we are using a variety of editors/platforms, but I'm  
looking to try and standardise. Are there any recommendations for  
cross-platform css/xhtml editors out there. Primary development  
platform will be Linux, but would be useful to have something that  
runs on Windows & Mac as well for use on laptops etc.




I use Eclipse, with various plugins to support assorted languages. It  
gives me syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and a lot of debugging  
functionality, whether I'm working with (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript,  
Java, PHP, XSLT or just about anything else. It's open source,  
written in Java so it's cross-platform, and pre-packaged  
installations are available for many platforms; see www.eclipse.org/>.


HTH,

Nick.
--
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http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/





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Re: [WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Nick Roper]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I did wonder about running topstyle under 
crossover/wine on the Linux box. Don't think topstyle does 
code-collapsing though, which would be particularly handy sometimes in 
large xhtml docs.


Nick

Tony Crockford wrote:


(of course you could always run Topstyle in a virtual machine!)

hth





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Re: [WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Tony Crockford]

Nick Roper wrote:
Have looked at resources on the WSG site and also punted around on the 
web and tried Amaya, CSSED etc, but any input from out there would be 
appreciated.


You might take a look at Aptana

http://www.aptana.com/
Aptana: The Web IDE

it's javascript focussed but does HTML and CSS.

I wasn't terribly excited by it - it seemed slow and clunky compared to 
Topstyle.


I'd be interested in any other alternatives too.

(of course you could always run Topstyle in a virtual machine!)

hth



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[WSG] Recommendations for x-platform css/xhtml editors?

[Nick Roper]

Hi List,

At present we are using a variety of editors/platforms, but I'm looking 
to try and standardise. Are there any recommendations for cross-platform 
css/xhtml editors out there. Primary development platform will be Linux, 
but would be useful to have something that runs on Windows & Mac as well 
for use on laptops etc.


Currently using Topstyle on Windows, which has great functionality but 
not available for *nix. Ideally, functionality would include auto 
tag/bracket completion, auto completion for attributes styles etc, 
code-folding, and html tidy. Doesn't need to deal with programming as we 
use ZDE or Kate for all the PHP stuff on the Linux boxes.


Have looked at resources on the WSG site and also punted around on the 
web and tried Amaya, CSSED etc, but any input from out there would be 
appreciated.


Cheers,

Nick

--
Nick Roper
partner
logical elements



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