On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, L. David Baron wrote: > > > > http://hixie.ch/specs/css/font-size-ui/font-size-ui > > > > Basically it integrates font size scaling with the page zoom, and does > > away with the "font size pref" (setting it to 16px for all fonts). > > This still requires the user to re-adjust for each new broken page. > And it also adds the requirement that they re-adjust for pages that use > the user's defaults. > > User requirements for viewing text vary *widely*, depending on the > user's eyesight (which tends to vary with age) and the monitor > resolution and distance. The user should be able to set a size and > actually have it be used.
That's exactly what my proposal attempts. It assumes that most pages use either font-size: medium or font-size: small. In my experience that is a safe assumption. Using that assumption, it provides a UI from which the user is able to preview what those two sizes will look like, as well as setting a minimum size. If your argument against this proposal is that it is not possible to select a zoom factor that will make both medium and small be acceptable, then that is possible. I don't have the data to argue that. > > > * we enforce that preference by making scaling all pages so that the > > > 25th (roughly) percentile sized text on a page is sized to be at > > > least as large as the preference (bug 31961). This should be > > > implemented at a pretty low level (e.g., text frames, perhaps after > > > checking visibility). > > > > I would imagine this would cause all kinds of strange effects. e.g. > > consider what it would do to a page that only contained only a flash > > image and its copyright, in small text. (Interestingly, the suggestion > > I made above actually would even handle pages with no text at all.) > > So the copyright text would be at the user's preferred size for reading > text. I don't think that's a big problem. I think many people would disagree. > > > * To handle separate language-group and fixed-vs.-proportional > > > font size preferences, what we actually do is (instead of > > > accumulating the actual font sizes and comparing to the preference at > > > the end) accumulate actual-to-preferred ratios and look at the > > > appropriate percentile of those ratios. > > > > I would recommend doing away with this altogether, at the very least > > doing away with the monospace-vs-proportional nonsense. I've been > > browsing the Web with all my fonts set to 16px for years and it looks > > fine. > > I tend to agree, but the proposal I made for how to handle it makes the > two issues unrelated. And I'd rather leave them unrelated. I'd rather simplify the entire font size UI down to two prefs and be done with it. The best thing to do is probably to implement a variety of options, including yours, and then perform some extended usability testing to determine which is the most effective with end-users. My biggest concern with your proposal is that most users would want to turn it off, which implies yet another pref. IMHO that makes the problem worse. One thing I like about my proposal is that it grandfathers in the existing author trend of using "small" as the default size (to get around the fact that 16px is too big for most users), without risking that authors get angry at the browser not doing what it was asked to do. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
