Re: Beta's rude CSS

On 4 Sep 2009, at 9:55 AM, Felix Miata wrote:

> W3 pages should be a prime example of best practices. Its beta home  
> page is
> currently nothing of the sort. It disobeys W3's own recommendation
> (<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size>), quite blatantly in
> http://beta.w3.org/2008/site/css/advanced lines 2+3 where it rudely  
> sets body
> {font-size: 13px}.
>
> In the combined total of http://beta.w3.org/2008/site/css/minimum and
> http://beta.w3.org/2008/site/css/advanced there are 42 lines  
> containing
> 'font-size' or 'font:' specifying the size in px, out of 125 such  
> lines
> total. Undoubtedly had it been part of the sample used as a basis for
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html this violation  
> alone would
> put it in the #1 problem group.
>
> Those two CSS files are made up of 2981 lines in 84k bytes. This is  
> arguably
> a designer attempt at too much control. One result of that control  
> is that a
> simple user (defensive) stylesheet containing nothing but 'body  
> {font-size:
> medium !important}' causes most page text to be considerably larger  
> than the
> default setting (e.g. using Firefox 2.0.0.20 set without a minimum  
> font size,
> #w3c_most-recently .description expand_description text is 140% of  
> (28.4^2
> actual/ 24^2 default), according to DOMI).

Hi Felix,

Thank you for the comment; we'll have a look. I do note that this  
issue has been
raised before:
  http://www.w3.org/2009/04/beta-comments

Here is our observation:

  "Commenter refers to an article which itself talks about the trade- 
offs between setting font-size to approximately 62.5% and leaving it  
at 100%. This is a known issue for which there are multiple  
perspectives and experiences (and no easy answer). We consciously  
chose a base font size for the site in order to solicit feedback on  
this question. Inclined to leave as-is / do more user testing."

  _ Ian

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Friday, 4 September 2009 15:02:24 UTC