RE: Font Sizes

The debate about "liquid" vs "fixed" design is mainly one of accessibility
and adaptability vs design control.
 
As Amanda pointed very well, the problem is that most people use fixed
design by lack of knowledge. Sometime fixed design can be a graphical choice
at the cost of accessibility, but you may assume this depending on your
goals. On mobile however, I don't see such need to absolutely keep control
on font-size as you often don't have it anyway.
 
On margin or border .. that's another story as not adapting relatively often
do not break readability and allow you to keep control over your main
devices target. But if you keep pixels, you must know the risks.
 
So I totally agree with Amanda about the font-size property and about
highlighting the disadvantage of using fixed units in general.
 
I think there is a very good article about it on "A list apart".
 
 
Regards,
Nicolas Combelles
 

  _____  

De : public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] De la
part de Andrea Trasatti
Envoyé : vendredi 28 octobre 2005 15:59
À : public-bpwg@w3.org
Objet : Re: Font Sizes


On 10/27/05, Amanda.Song@nokia.com <Amanda.Song@nokia.com> wrote: 


Hello Best Practices Working Group,

I read the Mobile Web Best practices document and under the topic of 
Measurements, you mention that people should use relative units, but I
think it is important to mention explicitly the problems with using
pixel units. I would like to steer web site developers away from using
pixels as a form of measurement AT ALL, whether that be font size,
border size, margins, padding, etc.  For example, with our new high
resolution devices, a 12 pixel font is unreadable.  This requires us to
calculate the screen resolution, then apply a special multiplier in 
order for the font to be legible.  I don't really think that this is
what the web site developer wants or intends for us to have to do in
order to properly render their site.


Hello Amanda,
    what if the site owner WANTED the font to be 12 pixels? Are you saying
that you make it bigger regardless of what the author wanted?

This is exactly what generates (generated) device diversity! 

I agree with the idea of using relative sizes, but I am sorry to say that
I'm not quite happy with your choice of making the font bigger.



The only other thing I would mention here has to do with images. With
higher resolution devices, the size of the image also is reduced, so 
that might be something that the web developer should keep in mind as
well.  I am not sure the following statement is true: "An exception to
this being where an image has been specifically sized for a display, 
references to the image in markup may specify the exact dimensions of
the image in order to help the browser to flow the page, and avoid
re-flowing it after the page has been retrieved. "  I would ask "Which 
display?".  My high resolution Nokia device, my low resolution Nokia
device, or my desktop?  The bottom line here is that pages should be
developed in a resolution independent way.




Maybe we should rephrase it?
What is meant is that if the site recognizes the device (the one the user is
using to browse) and has a content adaptation software that automatically
resizes the image to fit the screen "perfectly" then the software might use
the exact image width and height to make the browser's life easier.

-- 

Andrea Trasatti
atrasatti@gmail.com
Personal Blog: http://trasatti.blogspot.com