[thelist] Font Sizes

[Geoff Sheridan]

Quite surprised to get flamed for my opinion on this.

>>Me? I set base font size at 80% and then size other text in ems.
>
>Have you ever seen that on a Mac?  Aaron is correct, it's for all
>intents & purposes unreadable.

I am a Mac user. As it happens I put the 80% in an @imported
stylesheet, and NN4 (the 'mac' you are talking about) gets 12px in a
<linked> stylesheet.

>What you're doing is making a massive assumption that everyone has good
>enough eyesight to see tiny text.  I'm sure you know that this simply
>isn't true.

If I made this assumption I would set my font sizes in px. The whole
point of setting them in relative units is to improve accessibility -
they *can* be resized which is A Good Thing.

The sad fact is that there is no perfect solution to this and I
simply don't agree that setting default less than 100% is evil. I
have also used server-side stylesheet switchers to offer larger type,
but this can be cumbersome. Client-side style switching is easily
broken. The dive into accessibility solution has very definite
downsides - for example it can break CSS-P layouts for IE PC users
surfing at 'smaller', which is a popular choice. It also seems
excessively complex. The 1em route just looks plain ugly at default
text sizes.

It is up to the designer / developer to choose which downside they
are willing to accept. That I came to a different conclusion to yours
does not mean I am ignorant or 'don't care'.

g