> From: designer > Clearly, the use of ems is just a nightmare, esp when you have several > images and have to guess what the em dimensions are,
Images should still be specified in pixels, imho, as pixel size is an intrinsic property of raster images. I'd posit (but admittedly it's my personal opinion, and I can see the opposite point as well) that the crummy look of badly resized images whose dimensions have been defined in relative units is far worse than having them at a static size when users make slight changes in text size. Of course, if the image contains crucial information, it should have appropriate ALT (and maybe even LONGDESC) attributes, or you may even consider not using an image at all (or a combination of CSS background image and normal text on top). This is really the area in which SVG would solve a lot of problems, if only it were better supported natively in browsers...(for geometric images anyway...you'd still have the same issue with raster images, of course) > so > what's wrong with > 'complete zoom' instead of 'text zoom'? With page zoom it's very easy to end up with something that requires the user to scroll both horizontally and vertically. Particularly on small screens, this can become a pain when all the user wanted to do was to punch up the text size a notch or two because the designer chose some (to them) illegibly small size. Keep in mind that users will not generally blow up the text size to extraordinary amounts - if they need text that big, they'll more than likely need it that size for the rest of their OS, so they'd be using a small screen resolution to begin with, and/or employ screen magnifiers (either software or hardware solutions). Nonetheless, it's part of the constraints for designers working with the medium of the web that they should at least keep in mind that users may be changing their preferred text sizes. Sites should, within reason, be designed in a way that doesn't make them completely fall apart when this happens. Sizes of +/- 50-100% should still be handled reasonably gracefully. Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
