[thelist] Font Size

[Tom Dell'Aringa]

--- "Timothy J. Luoma" <lists at tntluoma.com> wrote:

> Generally the user is assumed to consider his/her base font
> acceptable,
> and making it smaller will likely make it more difficult for them
> to use
> your site.
>
> I generally leave font sizes OFF of BODY and P whenever possible.
>
> Then again I never underline anything that isn't a link unless it's
> a
> nice thick border-bottom.

That may or may not be true - but I think the idea is you want to
have SOME control over font sizes without leaving the user out of the
loop. If you are happy at what you think MIGHT be the base font size
of your users (you can really never know) then by all means leave it.


Speccing the font in the body tag or p tag also allows you to use the
cascade, which is beneficial. Everything that you want at default
size doesn't need to be specced.

All I can say is in real world practical usage, the technique is
working great and I've literally had no complaints and lots of
compliments on how it works.

One tricky thing you come up against of course is how the browsers
display default sizes. IE6 is even different from IE5.5...I'm sure
you know there are many many differences more than that too. You
can't use "large" or "medium" effectively because of the
downsides,and as much as I used to spec in pixels.. you leave the
user up a river without a paddle.

Tom

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