HTML 4.0 DTD and styles in HTML 4.0 compatible browsers

Hi there,
      I'm not sure if this query is stylesheet related or accessibilty
related but anyway here goes....
......In the stylesheet for the project I'm working on I had set the font
sizes in my unified stylesheet to 70%. The fonts appeared consistently well
throughout the site. However when I tried to import the HTML4 dtd using....

                  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
Transitional//EN"
                  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

...it caused the fonts to appear a lot smaller (practically unreadable in
fact) on fully HTML4 compatible browsers (e.g IE5 upwards, NS6). In NS4.7x
browsers it seemed that the DTD was ignored and the fonts appeared
normally. I'm just wondering what exactly does the DTD do to the page. Does
it redefine your font sizes or something? To try to fix this in IE5, NS6
etc I had to increase my font sizes from 70% to 100% so they would appear
as they did previous to importing the DTD. However on doing this obviously
the fonts in NS4.7x browsers now appeared a lot larger than normal. Has
anybody had this problem before? Is there any other solution that allows
you to import the DTD and have consistent fonts across all browsers. One
that comes to mind is defining a seperate stylesheet just for NS4.x
browsers, but this seems like a lot of effort to go to in order to satisfy
a WCAG Priority 2 checkpoint. Any queries/help/suggestions are more than
welcome. Mail me @ joe_harney@smartforce.com.

                                    Cheers,
                                    Joe


PS One more thing, when I added the doctype to the pages without the URL to
the DTD, everything appeared fine across all browsers. If I just do this am
I still satisfying the WCAG checkpoint?? Or do I need to specifically
reference the DTD? Thanks again - Joe



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Received on Friday, 19 July 2002 08:26:52 UTC