On Thu, September 6, 2007 2:13 pm, Timothy Swan wrote:
> On Sep 5, 2007, at 10:09 PM, Dean Edridge wrote:
>
>> By giving users: body{font-size:100%;} you are doing the best you
>> can at your end, and It's up to them to ensure they have correctly
>> configured their browser to suit their eyesight or preferences.
>
> I'd tend to agree with those that using the browser defaults as the
> base font size would be ideal. Unfortunately we're dealing with years
> of legacy web pages where the vast majority of fonts have been sized
> down already (in my own unscientific study, over 90% of the sites I
> sampled had the base <p> set to give an equivalent of 12-13 pixels.)
>Probably the same 90% who are not designing Web standards compliant. This however is the Web Standards Group (not the Microsoft support group) and we shopuld be designing to those standards. > > It's not rocket science to see that if the New York Times (base body > 84.5%), Google (base body 12px), and Yahoo (base body 84.5%) all use > smaller base font sizes, using 100% will result in fonts that look > much larger than "normal." > > This is not a discussion of philosophy but of practicality. I want my > visitors to be able to resize the text to fit their needs, but I also > want my site to adhere to a widely accepted standard, which is *not* > 16px. 12pt IS the widely accepted standard - it is the result of years of research into Human Computer Interaction costing multi-millions in usability testing investment by screen manufacturers and software development companies - that's why it's chosen as the default. Amother statistic that seems to be unavailable is the vast numbers of users who dont know how to change text size - and who subsequently go around muttering "I wish those bleedin' idiots would make the text bigger". > > Tim Swan > > -- > Timothy Swan > Designer/Webmaster support > InforME > > > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* > > ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
