View -> Text Size :: Relative increase and decrease in IE

I've come across a topic which is difficult to explain with ASCII text, so I
made some screenshot examples and an HTML page to illustrate my
problem/question. If you have a minute, maybe the information is useful to
you; maybe not. Either way, thanks for taking a moment to read it.

Example: http://www.azimg.com/textsize/

In a nutshell, IE4,5,5.5,6 (unlike NS7 and OP7 which zoom text AND graphics)
has the View --> Text Size menu with Smallest through Largest. In trying to
determine the ratio of text scaling going on, I found there was no ratio, in
fact, it turned into a much more perplexing question than I could possibly
imagine. (Why would Microsoft hard-code text-size values using non-standard
differences between text sizings?)

Our issue is the vast majority of our users use IE on Windows. The text
sizes we've used on http://eastvalleytribune.com/ are fine if 'Medium' is
selected, but with 'smaller' or 'smallest' it's unreadable. At least one
other site we looked at doesn't seem to have this problem. 

Is it possible to tell what setting (either Text Size or View Zoom or
whatever) the user has their browser set to?

Is it possible to prevent the user from scaling text below a certain point,
but up however big they like?

I am wondering if the problem I am having on my site is caused by inheriting
"smaller" more than once based on the cascade effect? In other words, if you
have 0.9em on a div and a td and an a, then is the a inside a td inside a
div going to get 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9 = 0.729?

I know the Tribune site is far from being accessible, but we're slowly
making progress in the right direction... the insight from this list has
been tremendous. 

Thanks-

Geoff Hoffman
Lead Web Developer
AZ Interactive Media Group
Work: (480) 898-7730
Cell: (480) 231-8323

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2003 19:01:23 UTC