Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T. wrote:
> Was just reading all the back and forth about text box sizes, and one
> person or the other saying something to the effect there was no
> standards about something.
>
> Anyway. I agree that its impossible even with standards for a page to
> look the same (if the page uses hard numbers for heights and widths).
> And the problem with fonts from Platform to Platform are different.
>
> Example 10 point Arial on a PC is only 72/96's as large on a Mac. in Mac
> system there are 72 dot per inch.
> on a PC the font would show as 10 pt. on a MAC if my math is correct
> would be only 3/4 as much (about 7.5 pt). On the other hand if it is 10
> point on a Mac it would be 1-1/3 x as big on a PC. (14 pt ? on PC).
>
> In other words standards are an unattainable goal.
Actually, 72 dpi is a publishing standard, which the Mac OS follows and
Windows follows its own (96). But IE and Mozilla on the Mac emulate, not
sure if that's the correct word, 96 dpi on the browser so it's
consistent with the font rendering on Windows. So unless someone decides
to change the dpi settings in their browsers, the font rendering comes
pretty close (very acceptably close in my opinion) between Mac OS and
Windows.
I didn't say that standards are unattainable, and I don't want to give
that impression. There are ambiguities with all standards, so variation
is expected. But with certain things (namely tables, margins, CSS boxes,
etc, I don't want to repeat myself too much) you can render exact
dimensions that look the same as long as the browser supports HTML and
CSS properly. Those are pretty attainable goals in standards compliance.
However, things that are more likely to be OS specific, like textboxes
and types of fonts, then you start getting variations where you don't
have exacting precision. For these things, the goal is to come close,
and web designers must acknowledge that exacting precision in this area
is not possible so they shouldn't stress over this.
--
Alex <:3)~~
http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/
