On 2007/05/25 00:58 (GMT-0700) Paul Novitski apparently typed: > At 5/25/2007 12:15 AM, Felix Miata wrote:
>>On 2007/05/25 15:31 (GMT+1000) Kane Tapping apparently typed: >> > Setting the body to font size to 65% - 70% is a good start. >>Actually it's a bad start, arbitrarily assuming that there's something wrong >>with the user's choice of default, and reducing it by some arbitrary amount, >>even though you don't have a clue what it was to start with. > In my efforts to build zoomable layouts [max-width at window width] > I've found it convenient to declare a body font-size of 62.5% The Clagnutt 62.5% scourge or bane of user stylesheets. :-( > so that, on a PC with a default font size of 16px, 1em = 10px at normal > zoom. It makes calculations very easy. For example, if you begin > with a content column of 790px, that converts to 79em and becomes > zoomable. An image that's 100px wide becomes 10em wide. It may be convenient as long as you find it necessary to fight the inherent nature of the web instead of embracing it. Pixels are a purely arbitrary size that bear no relationship to any particular physical size, and certainly not one that bears any useful relationship to "right" sized fonts from a typical web user's perspective. Instead of wanting a content column of Xpx, you should want a column of Xem or Xex or Xwords, from which you set sizes in em or ex or %, and let the user agents futz over how many pixels to use to do it. The web isn't print. > In that context, one can make one's base font size 1.6em (16px at > normal zoom on a PC). This presents body text at the same size it > would have been had font-size not been styled, yet at the same time > makes scaling calculations much easier for the designer. But not easier for the visitor.... > It seems like a win-win situation. Can you see a flaw? Every day.... > Even on Mac monitors running at 96dpi, reducing the text to 62.5% and > then increasing to 1.6 should bring it back to 100% of the default > size, whatever that may be. Here's a site probably pretty typical of Clagnutt 62.5% sites: http://eons.com/ Here's what its designers probably expect it to look like (same in FF and Safari): http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/eons-16ms.jpg Here's what it looks like when the user has bumped his default up from 16px to 20px (same in FF and Safari): http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/eons-20ms.jpg Here's what it looks like in Safari with the 20px default size enforced as a minimum: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/eons-20ms-m20.jpg And here's what it looks like in FF with the 20px default size enforced as a minimum: http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/SS/eons-20mf-m20.jpg Note the radical difference between the latter two applies also when a user stylesheet employs the simple 'body {font-size: 100% !important}' rule designed to counteract web sites that employ the more common methods of undersizing content text. Since neither Opera nor Safari are available on my OS of choice, and thus have only SeaMonkey and Firefox to choose from, I get to choose between gigantic fonts on Clagnut pages, or turning off author styles entirely. Clearly Eons is a site designed neither for its own users (people over 50, whose eyesight is poorer than average), nor for cross-browser compatibility, nor to accommodate users generally who need text to be big enough to read and who use text zoom and/or user stylesheets and/or minimum text size and/or a higher than 96 DPI system setting to do it. One thing that is standard about the web is there is no standard relationship between the size text a designer sees on his screen and the size a visitor sees on his own screen on that same page. http://pages.prodigy.net/chris_beall/TC/You%20don't%20know.html -- "The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day." Proverbs 4:18 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
