[thelist] Font Sizing

[john-paul]

> See, the nice thing about a lot of web technologies is that much of
> the personalisation benefits which many companies spent a lot of
> time and money on can very simply be achieved by using the
> capabilities your browser *already has*. These will work fine,
> unless you explicitly break them.

Ok, you've mentioned this a couple times. I'll admit, I don't have a
complete understanding of all the browsers that this applies to. What
browsers are not be able to resize px-sized units?

My ideal situation would be able to spec font-sizes, etc that would display
correctly (to my spec) across browser/platform as a "default". Then, if the
user needs bigger or smaller sizes, they can use their browser to size them.
(By the way, I always make sites that gracefully stretch to accommodate
different text sizes.)

> And guess which makes the bigger business benefit - having a
> site which panders to the ego of a designer ...

I suppose this isn't really the place to get into a discussion about the
importance of design. However, I will say that Design has value. History has
proven this... why do you think corporations spend tons of dough of slick
marketing/branding? Because it's important. The web is no different.

> Because they recognise that flexibility in font size is A Good Thing
> which benefits others than just themselves and don't want to impose
> their egos on users. See the first point above.

I believe flexibility is a Good Thing, however, the methods in question
cannot be explicitly be The Right Thing To Do (yet) because there are too
many downsides.

:: john-paul
:: music :: http://www.mmodule.com
:: collective :: http://www.four09.org

> From: Martin <martin at members.evolt.org>
> Reply-To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 14:47:38 +0100
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: Re: [thelist] Font Sizing
>
>
> On Tuesday, May 7, 2002, at 01:34  pm, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
>>>> The answer to both those issues is simple: "Yes, very true.  So what?"
>>>
>>> I didn't realize that this was such a religious issue.  I guess I
>>> haven't
>>> been around long enough.
>>
>> It can be an issue that arouses much passion.  We have, on one side,
>> those that like *complete* control of *everything*.
>
> And the news for these people is "Sorry, not applicable in this medium".
> (although *slightly* applicable in an intranet environment where you have
> an absolute homogenous platform, which given employment law on
> disability discrimination is somewhat unrealistic (the absolute bit) to
> expect).
>
> If you really, really do want this level of control, then you probably
> are
> looking at having your entire site as a set of images, one per page.
>
>> We have, on one side, talentless hacks.
>
> Which I'm assuming there are none of on this list
>
>> And we have, on one side, conscientious people
>> who would *like* to help but who've read on A List Apart that you only
>> get to heaven if you use pixels for font-size.
>
> Which article is about 2 years old. The main criticisms for ems being
> 1) IE3 seriously breaks em-sized units. Is making a site inaccessible for
> IE3 users (who are fewer than they were 2 years ago) more of a
> problem
> than making it inaccessible to people with visual impairments? Your
> call
> for your site, but the balance is clearly tipping away from IE3
> users.
> 2) NN4 ignores em-sized units, which means that you'll still get a nice
> hierarchy of font sizes from h1 down, all beautifully resizable.
>
> The author of that article seems to accept the limitations of the @import
> syntax, so perhaps it's valid to define em-sized fonts in the @imported
> stylesheet, which both those browsers will ignore anyway.
>
> The pt argument is valid btw - points are still meaningless for
> screen display.
>
>> That covers the Pixel
>> People.  We also have, on one side, those who use ems because they've
>> been taught it's The Right Thing To Do.  We also have, on one side,
>> those with rather bad eyesight[1].
>> [1] That doesn't explain why they can't have large fixed-sized text
>
> Because they recognise that flexibility in font size is A Good Thing
> which benefits others than just themselves and don't want to impose
> their egos on users. See the first point above.
>
> See, the nice thing about a lot of web technologies is that much of
> the personalisation benefits which many companies spent a lot of
> time and money on can very simply be achieved by using the
> capabilities your browser *already has*. These will work fine,
> unless you explicitly break them.
>
> Cheers
> Martin
>
> _______________________________________________
> email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID:    0xA835CCCB
> martin at members.evolt.org      snailmail:    30 Shandon Place
> tel:    +44 (0)774 063 9985                Edinburgh,
> url:    http://www.easyweb.co.uk            Scotland
>
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