[thelist] x-small

Andrew Clover and at doxdesk.com
Sun Jan 20 08:10:09 CST 2002


Peter van Dijck <peter at poorbuthappy.com> wrote:

> I'm a stylesheet simpleton, but I'm using font size x-small in my 
> stylesheet.

You didn't want to do that.

> I got complaints from a mac user that on NN + Mac the font looks waaay
> too small.

Yes, it would be. Two underlying reasons -

  1. IE/Win implements 'x-small' as the size 'small' should be, and 'small'
     as the size 'medium' should be, and so on. If you're using IE on
     Windows, and it's not IE6 in Standards Mode, you're seeing fonts one
     size bigger than they really are. 'x-small' should really be, well,
     excessively-small, not much use for body text.

  2. N4 implements the font-size keywords using a factor of 1.5 linear scale
     between each size as per CSS1, instead of the 1.2 settled on for CSS2
     which IE uses. Thus 'small' in N4 is somewhat smaller than it should
     be, and 'x-small' is loads smaller than it should be.

> I just want a font size that looks good and resizes nicely in all browsers.

em or %. The only browser they mess up in is IE3. Just remember that they
are relative to their parents, so nesting them may lead to trouble if you're
not expecting that.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://and.doxdesk.com/




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