Sent by Alan K. Gay on 19 November 2002 23:11
Thoroughly confused, and having long since decided this was a practical,
not a religious, issue, I've done some testing on the interaction
between how font-size and line-height are specified in css styles and
the text-size settings on IE 5.5 and 6.0 (all W2K). The summary
findings are summarized at http://www.probuild.com/test/fontsummary.htm.
The test page I used is at http://www.probuild.com/test/fonttest.htm.
(Note: to test all the combinations in my summary, you will have to
download the test page and play with the CSS.)
Some interesting findings, at least to me, were:
1) if there is no "font-size" in the body style, or if the body font
size in % or em, changing text size in IE effects the line height even
of text that is set with px or pts.
2) if the font-size in the body is set in px or points, then the IE text
size doesn't affect ANYTHING except text that is sized with words
(small, x-small, etc). One implication of this is that px, pts, and em
all behave exactly the same relative to the browser text size parameter
if the body font size is in pts or px.
3 If size is specified in %, then there seems to be no effect of any
line-height specified at any level of the cascade.
4) IE's default size seems to be 12pts/16px, but it behaves like it is
defined in em or %, in that having no body font-style allows IE to
change the size of em and % styled text with the text size parameter in
the browser.
A few conclusions:
1) If you want the user to have the greatest control over text sizes in
IE 5.5/6.0, be sure you DO NOT define your body font-size in pts or px,
and then use any of the relative measures (em, %, words) in your style
tags. But if you use percent, you lose control over line-height.
2) If you want to eliminate any user control, you must have a font-size
in px or pts in the body style, and then use anything but words in the
rest of your style tags.
Where I'm headed and why. My company is an ASP that provides very deep
purchasing app to a narrow industry niche. The screens are very tightly
controlled (think client/server), and we only support IE 5+. We are
putting body font-size in pts, and then all the downstream tags are in
em. This seems to keep the printers happy so we only have to provide
printer styles for the stuff we want to print differently than it
displays, but we get more granular control of size that pts provides.
YMMV.
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