[thelist] Default font size IEWin

Tue Oct 1 11:14:01 CDT 2002

At 07:09 AM 10/01/2002, Rob Schumann wrote:
>I have a VERY simple page (see css and html below). Viewing on IE Mac,
>Mozilla is absolutely fine. However, on a completely new and default
>install of IE5, 5.5 or 6 for PC (Win98 SE) the text is HUGE... a blind bat
>could read it from 3 metres without the aid reading glasses...
>
>My concern is that this is DEFAULT setup for IEWin, and therefore that
>most likely to be encountered by the "don't fiddle with default settings"
>masses out there. Stepping down to "smaller" igives tollerable results,
>but still not as small as 11px, but "smallest" is simply too small.
>
>Am I missing something?? Advice/comments/cures would be most welcome
>==> The HTML... (sorry, line-wrap)
>
><?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
>  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

It's the XML declaration that's causing that.

IE 5 has a bug where the default font size is huge as you see.  IE6, when
it see the XML declaration, goes into its "quirks mode" (another bug
itself) and emulates IE5 behavior, including font sizes.

Other than the other hacks already discussed in the thread, the other
solution is to remove the XML declaration.  The fonts should then look OK
in IE6 and probably 5.5, but will still be big in 5.0 because it's just
broken that way.

Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
evolt at accessibleinter.net
http://www.accessibleinter.net/