> Default font sizes: Firefox 18px, IE 16pt. This amounts to about 2px of
> difference in the defaults
> Setting body {font-size:12px} (or any fixed size) will set both IE and
> Firefox identical display sizes. To avoid diminishing the accessibility,
a
> user control should be provided on the page to increase or decrease the
> font-size for IE.
> I don't quite get it. Why do you care about the 2px difference at all?
> Your design is scalable (I assume this from the fact that you want to
> use a font-resize control) and will look good in both cases.
I'll try to answer as best I can, correct a mistake I made, and mention
another hack solution I came up with.
The point (of not controlling default font sizes) has been argued quite a
bit over the years. At my company, we're all about designing fluid layouts.
Most of my work is exactly that. The 2px difference is normally not a
factor. I have a couple of instances where the 2px becomes an annoyance.
One is a customer who *requires* a fixed 800x600 layout. No vertical
scrolling. We design the text to fit and if the user increases the
font-size because he wants larger text... well, he will get scrolling and
that's OK.
We design content for this fixed layout , then test in Firefox and get a
surprise vertical scroll (in normal text view). The Firefox 2px is just
enough to push it over the edge.
This isn't a major problem, but it does seem like one that should be
controllable. It would eliminate surprises, and unneeded revisions if the
difference were not present.
I may have a solution.
----------
I have a type-o above--- IE default is 12pt, which is almost exactly 16px.
Interesting that IE uses pts, every other browser I've queried using
getStyle shows px...
Every other browser I tested, Opera, Netscape, default to 16px.
Firefox default is 18px.
The hack-fix I had in mind was to continue to use percentages, but adjust
for Firefox as follows...
Body {font-size: 75%} // places browsers with 16px defaults to 12px (Opera,
IE, Netscape)
Body {font-size: 66%} // places Firefox with 18px default to 12px
It takes a couple of lines of JavaScript to set the Body Font-size
accordingly, but the results are very close. The View Text-Size works well
too, (in all browsers) keeping the accessibility in place.
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