Font Sizes

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.

I would also think it would be helpful to mention why it is best to
reduce the number of font sizes used on a page. It not only makes a page
easier to read:-)  Fonts have a definite performance impact. The more
fonts that have to cached, the more memory taken up, the more context
switching has to be done, and the more time is required to load the
fonts.  To sum it up, the more fonts a page uses the more of a
performance impact it has on the browser.

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.

Best,
Amanda Song
Technical Lead - S60 Platform - Browser

Received on Thursday, 27 October 2005 04:58:46 UTC