Re: UI: Sizing fonts relative to UI fonts

At 2:46 PM -0500 2/15/00, Braden N. McDaniel wrote:

>Have there been any proposals which would address this problem? It seems
>like it might be handy to have a way to go to a sort of alternate
>inheritance model.

I am working on a series of proposals that may be relevant. Briefly, they are:

* Introduce the "base-font-size" property. This contextualizes the 
absolute font size keyword table for the selection, supplying a 
length (or system?) value for the "medium" keyword.

* Explicitly state that 1em on the document root derives its value 
from "user space" or UI. Thus declaring base-font-size: 1em on the 
document root would describe commonly expected (but nowhere formally 
normalized) behavior.

* Retract CSS-2's suggested 1.2 scaling factor between keyword 
indices, suggesting instead an interval system modelled on 
predominant HTML 1-7 implementations, in which the smallest index is 
essentially guaranteed to be at least adequately resolved, regardless 
of (user or author-declared) base size. The bottom point of the scale 
is defined to be the larger of either the least legible size or a 
suggested factor (.6) of the base (medium) size.

So (something like) this could work:

   selector {
     base-font-size: caption;
     font-size: xx-small;
   }

...producing adequately resolved but very small text relative to a 
"medium" caption.

--
Todd Fahrner

Received on Tuesday, 15 February 2000 17:40:59 UTC