On 5/25/07, Philip Kiff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Felix Miata wrote:
> What matters is:
> [...]
> 5-that any deviation a designer makes from 100% is
> arbitrary, as it's made from an entirely unknown starting point
>
> 100% of the visitor's choice equals respect for the visitor.
I'm not really convinced that this is an issue of "respect" for the users of
one's site.
The reference that Kane provided to Owen Briggs's charts over at
thenoodleincident.com I think demonstrates how the operating system
manufacturers and browser companies are the ones who have been arbitrary
about what 100% font size on the body element means. Here is a link to Owen
Briggs's page discussing Sane CSS Typography:
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/typography/index.html
As Kane pointed out, and as Owen Briggs's screenshot studies demonstrate,
the use of 76% as the body font size is "to create a more even base-line
size across multiple browsers". This 76% figure is not therefore entirely
arbitrary: setting the body font size to 65%-76% or so is the size that
designers have come up with over the years that allows them the most freedom
to produce designs that appear similiar across different browsers and
different operating platforms. These levels don't come from any disrespect
felt towards site visitors, but from a disrespect for the arbitrariness of
different browser defaults and a desire to override the choices made by
those browsers.
Isn't this basically the same kind of thing that a designer does when they
apply "zeroing" to the body margins or body padding or to any other CSS
element that different browsers set differently. Designers modify the
default settings of CSS elements all the time - that is what a designer does
in order to create a design. Sure, designers should create designs that
scale nicely and play well with user specified font sizes, and of course web
designers should learn to embrace the idea that the sites they create will
be accessed in different ways and with different technologies that will not
permit pixel-perfect identical versions to be served to all users. However,
that doesn't mean that they have to give up on trying to produce designs
that look almost identical to the way they want in the default settings of
the browsers that appear most frequently in their site traffic logs.
I wonder, is it possible that 65%-76% base size body font is in fact the
level that has become a kind of standard on the web? Or perhaps the web has
a dual standard: one is 65-76% and the other is 100%? In any case, I'm not
convinced that the choice by many web designers to use 65-76% will be easily
overcome, especially given its usefulness from a design standpoint, and the
apparent arbitrariness of the 100% alternative.
I hate to make a quick reply to a long post, but not all designers set
body font size to 62.5% when creating websites. It's enough to start
at 100% and set nested containers to fractions of that... just do the
math starting off from 16px. The point that Felix is making is that
setting the body to something small like 62.5% is very destructive,
since user stylesheets and user settings usually just override the
body rule (and ruin all your specific rules).
--
--
Christian Montoya
christianmontoya.net .. designtocss.com
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