Romily Jones wrote:
The BBC's site is a good guide -- they did tons of usability
research,
...
They did, but the latest update I could find is more than 2 years old.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/technical/css.shtml>
...not all of it made good read today, although I didn't see anything
"harmful" at first glance.
The main thing is that those few pages I went through worked well when I
adjusted my preferred font-size up a little, but broke when I went a
little further. Overlapping lines caused by fixed line-height -- on
BBC's own home page...
In short: the BBC site does not follow its own guidelines.
I find that 82% on the body tag with nothing necessary for the p tag
(isn't 1em the default) gets Opera and other common (ok, Opera isn't
common) browsers to produce the same size text, though I can't be
sure what I see on a Mac is exactly the same. But the proportions in
the sites look the same, as far as I can see.
Opera is as common as any other browser which name doesn't look like "IE".
Text on web pages rendered in a number of common browsers on a Mac, will
measure the same (height/width) if you count pixels relative to
resolution. The difference is in how Mac-OS render fonts (better).
I find 82% on body to be just fine, as long as the page can take at
least 200%/24px without breaking and/or become unreadable or
unnavigable. So, when I define my own preference as a visitor to be
*min-font-size=16px* (or more), the page should still be working well.
Guide:
- The W3C site is a good guide. I don't use any other guides.
- The common browsers are my testing-ground. I don't need any other.
I usually take *the most common browser*: IE6/win, and set it to "ignore
font-size" and give me 22px (max) for paragraphs and similar text. Any
page that is unable to take that, is potentially failing for some 85-90%
of our visitors -- including my own designs.
Any comments/questions/statistics about "how many of our visitors are
aware of, or use, such an option", are completely irrelevant. All web
designers/coders should know about this since it has been like this for
the last 10 years. More user-options are on their way...
It is not font-size, but whether designers/coders create room for such
factors, or not, that makes all the difference.
regards
Georg
--
http://www.gunlaug.no
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