[thelist] User Agent Capabilities (was: CSS: Unix and font sizes)

Joe Crawford jcrawford at avencom.com
Mon Apr 16 02:35:43 CDT 2001


on 4/15/01 7:12 PM, Charles F. Johnson at charles at littlegreenfootballs.com
wrote:
> javascript would be a great way to handle this problem, wouldn't it? too bad
> there's no way to get the user's default font size from the DOM.

One approach, yes. More interesting, but I think something not being pursued
hard right now, would be to make such information available as part of a
package of "User Agent Capabilities." Theoretically the USER_AGENT and
HTTP_ACCEPT string should be providing that kind of information, but it's
not exactly information rich. Note the existence of "Mozilla" in the UA
string for IE. How useless is that? There was some work at the w3c in this
area with regards to small devices, but I don't think it's something we'll
get anytime soon. I agree 100% that it would be nice to have the browser
send useful information, and this would allow for content negotiation. We
already have some of this in the language category. (Ever visit google with
the older versions of iCab? You'd be greeted with Google in German!). As it
is this kind of interaction is not done very much. :-\

> another way to handle it would be for browsers to support a "baseline" font
> size, so the designer could specify the default setting  and scale up and
> down without fear of creating unreadable pages.

I believe you just described 'em'.

If you like 10px, and I like 20px as default font, then 1.5em is one thing
to you (15px), and another thing to me (30px).

Theory is nice, isn't it?

:-\

> with IE5 mac, that's exactly what we have, since you can resize any text. if
> IE for windows would allow resizing pixel-based text, this frustrating
> problem would go away. i was very disappointed to discover that the beta of
> IE6 still doesn't fix this bug.

Best,

    Joe <http://artlung.com/>
--
Joe Crawford ||||||||||||||       mailto:jcrawford at avencom.com
||||||||||||||||||||||||             http://www.avencom.com
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||      Avencom: Set Your Sites Higher






More information about the thelist mailing list