[thelist] font-size

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Thu Sep 11 21:19:09 CDT 2003


The font-size bug is not just an annoyance because the examples I 
provided only showed the link (or in some cases the entire page full of 
text, plus all the block-level elements) getting bigger when you click. 
Since they didn't have popup javascript windows, they couldn't 
demonstrate the full extent of the bug, which is once the link is 
clicked, the main browser window reverts to the medium font-size. That 
is what is happening in the split second before the page changes. You 
just don't have time to see the weird re-painting thing without a popup 
window.

It's alarming enough of a quirk that it causes some of our novice web 
users to think something is broken. I couldn't overcome it with any CSS 
trick. And believe me I tried all of them, including the ones that have 
been suggested here. What works, of course, is no font-size, but I was 
overruled.

I don't disagree that code should be well-written. You don't need to 
convince me or argue with me. It has been a goal of mine to achieve 
this, but it has been extremely difficult to convince the people I work 
with that it is important.

We will likely always use tables for layout purposes until CSS matures 
enough for the kind of control that is truly needed for a rich user 
interface such as what is required in our complex application.

In my efforts to convince the project manager we need good code, I 
believe I finally made a break-through today when I passed along a link 
to an article about Doctypes, quirks and standards compliance among 
browsers. The project manager I work with, who has always discounted 
what I do as something "non-technical", finally saw the light after 
reading the article, probably because it was so technical. He is 
finally agreeing that we ought to write better code, and he finally 
understands that he can't continue to allow his programmers to write 
poor code. He wants to know what we can do to clean it up.

Sometimes you have to take small victories along the way.



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