On 2009/02/17 21:59 (GMT-0500) Ron Koster composed: > the font sizes/proportions/percentages that David mentioned earlier...
> At 10:02 AM 2/13/2009 -0800, David Hucklesby wrote: >>I find that these percentages work best >>cross-browser: 69%, 75%, 82%, 94% ... with a base font-size of 100%. > ...have nothing to do with the "Golden Section", and to me would look I have to wonder if more than a tiny fraction of professional web designers know that that is. Probably far fewer of the zillion hack designers or the junkware they use to create would. > *disproportional* (even if it somehow gets rid of that "blur" effect > that was referred to earlier in the thread) and, well, basically > that's why I'm wondering what it is that's going on if/when one uses > other, different, in-between percentages. On my system (WinXP) > everything looks fine, no matter what browser I'm viewing anything > in, and no matter what percentage (or pixel size or whatever else) > I'm using for my font sizes. > By the way, just to throw another question into the fray, is there > anything wrong with using non-whole numbers (like 61.8, etc.) in > one's font size percentages? For reference, the closest amounts (to > one decimal place) to the percentages that David mentioned that would > indeed be perfectly within the Golden Section would be: 61.8%, 76.4%, > 85.4% and 94.4%. Those are the sorts of percentages that I'd *like* > to use, if I could (without causing problems anywhere/anyhow). Holy Grail or "magic" percentages stem from interplay of designers' traditional small (sub-default) fonts fetish, the amount of px each character has to work with, and characteristics of common web fonts. Way back many years ago, typical resolution was really really really low, which produced two significant general effects: 1-fonts with enough px to define them well were really big; 2-the ugliness of inadequate px density seems masked at small sizes. All rendering engines round nominal font sizes to whole numbers of px, but not all browsers use equivalent rounding methods. IE, the dominant overall representative, truncates every computed px size to a whole number, while some popular other browsers use something resembling the mathematical rounding most of us learned when we graduated from simple fractions to decimals in school. When you apply the "magic" percentages to the sizes available below the traditional 16px default, you find few that land on a whole number. The goal is percentage application that won't result in e.g. 11px in one browser while 12px in others due to their rounding differences, even when one percentage is applied to another through inheritance. To see the comparative differences, visit http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/font-rounding.html in IE, Opera, Gecko & Webkit, and compare the differences, and not only at the default font size, but also with different defaults and/or text zoom levels. If you reject the popular designer notion that every page should look identical in every browser, then (presuming you've avoided IE's scaling bugs) a 1px smaller or larger font from one browser to the next should not be a problem. Ultimately, there's a high likelihood that what the user sees will be different anyway, because any of his default text size, screen resolution, display size, seating distance, visual acuity, fonts actually installed, anti-aliasing, minimum font size, zoom level and other factors can vary, thus making it look different. -- "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up." Ephesians 4:29 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
