Sent by Timothy J. Luoma on 6 February 2002 16:04
On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Michael Collins wrote:
> So is there a problem with setting an absolute font size for the
> major parent tags that enclose text, and then using the em relative
> sizes to fine tune font size? For example:
A "problem" ?
Well that depends on your understanding of "problem"
> p, td, li, a, table, body { font-size:12px;
I just took a non-scientific study of about 100 folks I consider "average
computer users" With the exception of 2-3 of them, none of them were
particularly technical.
I then asked them what they disliked most about web sites they visit.
#1 was pop up windows (no shock here)
#2 was "too small to read"
Several of them had at least figured out how to change the font size to
'14' or '16' and then found that a lot of sites went around and changed it
on them, and they didn't know how to fix it.
> h1 { font-size:1.4em; }
> h2 { font-size:1.2em; }
> .size08 { font-size:0.8em; }
> .size09 { font-size:0.9em; }
> .size11 { font-size:1.1em; }
If you sent a fixed px size for the overall page, and then use 'em' to
adjust it, you really aren't doing much better than using fixed for all.
Why not leave the main body of the text as '1em' -- let the user define it
-- and then make things smaller or larger relative to that.
Why does it *have* to be 12px?
TjL, whose eyes are not as good as they once were, and who regularly used
to yell at C|Net for insisting on <font size="-1">
ps -- don't forget you can exert tighter control on your print.css if you
are concerned about how it will look on printout.
--
Timothy J. Luoma ~ http://www.tntluoma.com ~ Apprentice Webdesigner
"veni, vidi, validatio." (I came, I saw, I validated)
