[thelist] IE4/5 Font Size

Sun Oct 20 01:51:01 CDT 2002

Djinn wrote:
> Well I had some time to read the entire Dive into Accessibility site and
> now understand what Radio and Moveable Type mean. I didn't realize that the
> site was aimed at Blog users. I don't have or read Blogs and so didn't know
> how much there was to them! Anyway, suffice it to say that although I
> understand what the references are, I still don't know how to apply the
> code to my website inline.

Jean,

Inline styles are styles applied within the actual html tag.  So, for
example, the following inline style applies a medium font-size to a P tag:

<p style="font-size:medium">
    some text at medium size
</p>

The same can be done with a style declaration, usually declared within
the <head></head> tags of your page code.  Using the same example:

<style type="text/css">
p {font-size:medium;}
</style>

and then in the body of your page code:

<p>
    some text at medium size
</p>

The obvious benefit of using style declarations is to cut down on code
and make it *much* easier to maintain.  If you decide at some later date
that you actually want the font-size to be 'large', you only have to
change it in one place, rather than in every single P tag in your page.

Style sheets take this one (small) step further, and remove the style
declaration to a separate file.  So for this example again, within the
style sheet file you'd just have:

p {font-size:medium;}

and you'd save this file as 'yourStyleSheet.css'  You'd then call the
style sheet from the head section of your main page code:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="yourStyleSheet.css">

Hopefully that gives you a basic understanding of the different ways to
apply styles.  Now, for your problem, I'd recommend you put a simple
style declaration in the head section of your page, and not even specify
that it's for IE4/5.  The following is a skeletal page example:

<html>
<head>

<style type="text/css">
body, p, table {font-size:medium;}
</style>

</head>
<body>

<p>
    Some text in a paragraph.  Some text in a paragraph.
    Some text in a paragraph.  Some text in a paragraph.
    Some text in a paragraph.  Some text in a paragraph.
    Some text in a paragraph.
</p>

</body>
</html>

I hope that helps.  If that's not clear, just ask again :)

Good luck!

Karen
-------
Miinx Design & Development
e :: karen at miinx.com.au
p :: 0413.880.302
w :: www.miinx.com.au