Felix Miata wrote: > What matters is: > [...] > 5-that any deviation a designer makes from 100% is > arbitrary, as it's made from an entirely unknown starting point > > 100% of the visitor's choice equals respect for the visitor.
I'm not really convinced that this is an issue of "respect" for the users of one's site. The reference that Kane provided to Owen Briggs's charts over at thenoodleincident.com I think demonstrates how the operating system manufacturers and browser companies are the ones who have been arbitrary about what 100% font size on the body element means. Here is a link to Owen Briggs's page discussing Sane CSS Typography: http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/typography/index.html As Kane pointed out, and as Owen Briggs's screenshot studies demonstrate, the use of 76% as the body font size is "to create a more even base-line size across multiple browsers". This 76% figure is not therefore entirely arbitrary: setting the body font size to 65%-76% or so is the size that designers have come up with over the years that allows them the most freedom to produce designs that appear similiar across different browsers and different operating platforms. These levels don't come from any disrespect felt towards site visitors, but from a disrespect for the arbitrariness of different browser defaults and a desire to override the choices made by those browsers. Isn't this basically the same kind of thing that a designer does when they apply "zeroing" to the body margins or body padding or to any other CSS element that different browsers set differently. Designers modify the default settings of CSS elements all the time - that is what a designer does in order to create a design. Sure, designers should create designs that scale nicely and play well with user specified font sizes, and of course web designers should learn to embrace the idea that the sites they create will be accessed in different ways and with different technologies that will not permit pixel-perfect identical versions to be served to all users. However, that doesn't mean that they have to give up on trying to produce designs that look almost identical to the way they want in the default settings of the browsers that appear most frequently in their site traffic logs. I wonder, is it possible that 65%-76% base size body font is in fact the level that has become a kind of standard on the web? Or perhaps the web has a dual standard: one is 65-76% and the other is 100%? In any case, I'm not convinced that the choice by many web designers to use 65-76% will be easily overcome, especially given its usefulness from a design standpoint, and the apparent arbitrariness of the 100% alternative. Phil. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************