MOU, Take Verdana out of your list and it won't look so "cruddy". Problem with sizing for Verdana is that is significantly larger at the same pt/px size than any of the rest of the fonts in your list. So if the visitor doesn't have it and gets Arial it can be unreadable.
See http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html Personally if I'm going to specify one of the "web fonts" I'll use Tahoma over Verdana precisely because it isn't so wide. BTW, setting font sizes at 80% makes them illegible on my computer. With more and more high resolution screens making each px smaller because it is too big on the designer's screen can cause a lot of accessibility issues for people who wouldn't otherwise have a problem. I'm currently using a Toshiba m205 tablet pc. The screen size is 12.1" and the resolution is 1400x1050. As we all know using an LCD at a resolution other than its default results in text that is less sharp. To compensate I run large fonts but that still leaves the physical size of my fonts smaller than windows default on my 15" 1024x768 laptop. Since the true physical width of my tablet is 10" that means there are 140 physical per physical inch. At windows default the font size is 15px or slightly over 1/10th of a physical inch. You can do the math from there. That's why I've gone to using Firefox as my default browser so I can always over ride those settings. Otherwise I would not be able to use about half of the websites I go to on a regular basis. In my particular case pts are better than px because pts will honor my large font settings, while px does not. However, cross platform pts are worse than pixels. As far as IE 5 goes, I've got whole sites that haven't had an IE 5 hit in months. While hobby sites still get a decent percentage of IE 5 visitors (the http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/September/browser.php show it down to 13% there (a 4% decrease since June) other sites like the W3C show that browser is dying off (6% I think last time I checked but the url wasn't resolving for me this morning to check (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp). Frankly, I'd rather a site look not quite the way I want and the visitor be able to read it than have a site that they couldn't use. As far as who uses smallest on IE anyway, I do when I visit my father. His vision is bad due to diabetes so he runs 800x600 on a 20" monitor. I don't want to change his screen resolution (if I forget to change it back he would have trouble seeing to reset it) and it is easier to walk him through changing it back than it is into changing his screen resolution. Cheryl D. Wise Certified Professional Web Developer MS-MVP-FrontPage www.wiserways.com mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 713.353.0139 Office -----Original Message----- From: Ross Clutterbuck Joseph n rudy: > here's a tip: do not assign font size don't give them pixels, don't > give them ems, don't give them keywords don't set font size at all > then have a look at your page in various browsers Now y'see I've never agreed with this sort of approach. OK it does mean that the visitor has got full control over text resizing if required, but I find the results to be just horrendous when you're trying to work within a theme or feel for your site - the fonts I tend to use (Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, etc. to give the Windows names) tend to look cruddy at the browser-driven paragraphc size (looks to be about 13-14 pixels on my setup) and a lot of the time H1 and H2 are just too big. Also IE5/Win has got a bloody horrible resizing bug where the differences in each size setting are massive (even worse when using CSS keywords), so things get out of hand when extreme settings are being used in that browser. The sans-size definition approach does have its place in certain areas, but given improvements in technology on the web today, web design is becoming are more intricate and expansive area, even an artform if you have a look at the CSS Zen Garden. Designers/developers are pushing the boundaries on what we see on the web nowadays and every little aspect of a site's style and theme are wanting to be controlled. IMO just leaving out font sizes and letting the browser do the rest just because we're guaranteed user-sizable text seems to be an outdated mindset to think in - there's plenty that can be done to get the text we designers/developers want it and still keep things fluid and user-friendly for the end-user. I've been using a trick to keep EM sizes under control for a while now and it works fantastic for me: in your CSS, declare a rule for the body element and set it's font-size in there to 100%. You can then freely specify EM units for font sizes in other rules without silliness taking over. Example: body { font-size: 100%; } h1 { font-size: 1.5em; } p { font-size: 0.8em; } Those sort of sizes, I feel, give a nice standard size to work from - it doesn't get too small when the browser uses a smaller setting (who ever uses IE's "smallest" setting anyway? I've never found a study which ever mentions people use it) and still shows nice n chunky on larger settings without being ridiculous or naffing up the design's feel. The only thing you will need to worry about, as isthe case with CS in general, is that you don't start inheriting font-sizes from different elements - I've had a few minor bugs crop up where I've had a <div> font-size declared at somthing like 0.8em but accidentally had a paragraph inside that <div> declared at 0.7em (just something sightly smaller than I thought was standard for that div) - the bloody text came out microscopic because I was actually declaring 70% of the div's setting which was already 80% of the master page size! But keep an eye open and it's easy to spot and resolve. Just some thoughts. MOU ____ . The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM . ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. 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