[thelist] CSS Font Sizes, was one more thing about...

[Calum I Mac Leod]

Calum:
> > While % are fine with very careful use, <BIG> and <SMALL> are the
easiest
> > way to size fonts safely.  :-(

Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers:
> Ideally, you'd want to keep content & presentation a bit more
> separate than that, preferably using stylesheets.

I agree completely, which is why my preference is for using % or, as Charles
F. Johnson pointed out, nothing.

Using BIG and SMALL as a transitional approach is, IMO, valid (in the
general sense as well as the [SG|X]ML sense).  I'd quite like to go Strict
for everything, but I'm not inclined to send old browsers to hell and I can
sympathise with those who don't want to learn what NetExploder4 does with
CSS %.  (For the record, only a small amount of our output is Strict, and I
haven't decided when to start putting my foot down about it.)

<SMALL>&copy;2001 CIML</SMALL> isn't too dangerous, and neither is
<BIG><STRONG>Warning!</STRONG></BIG>.

I believe that CSS px for font-size is worse from a WWW perspective.

> For online use, as em doesn't work, the next best solution
> is to use px:
> http://evolt.org/article/Browser_testing_list/20/548/index.html
>
> Of course, some printers interpret this rather literally - 10px
> on a 1200dpi printer isn't very legible. So for printable templates,
> you need to use pt.

That wouldn't be a literal interpretation.  CSS px != pixels, which is
precisely why they're not as bad as they could be (though bad enough to
avoid).

I'd like to think that pages written today will be worth rendering on the
1200dpi screens of tomorrow.  But I'd also like to think that someone who
likes a default text size different from mine would be able to get a
comfortable rendering _without_ disabling my stylesheet.

> And neither of these are user-scalable via browser, so the next
> workaround is to provide something like:
> http://evolt.org/article/mumtheresadead/22/253/index.html (ASP)
> http://evolt.org/article/bishoponthelanding/17/4415/index.html (Perl)

Or work with % and tread carefully around the worst browser bugs.
Personally I could care less if Bad Browser X shows the headings too large.

Calum
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