RE: Absolute/Relative Sizes

Thinking about what Chris points out, I think there are a number of things
we would potentially want to do to address scalability. My thoughts and
proposals are below. Michael

* Should the guidelines address the issue of scalability? Or should they
take the perspective that it's a user agent thing and not something the
_content_ guidelines should address? My vote: the guidelines should address
the issue. In some technologies that may result in special author
requirements (dealt with at the techniques level), in others it may not.

* If we agree the guidelines should address it, where does it go? I'd say
it's definately under perceivable. It's arguably related to 1.3 (separation
of presentation and structure) and 1.4 (distinguish foreground from
background) but not really well enough. Perhaps a new guideline under
Principle 1?

* What priority level should it have? I think ensuring users can scale their
display would be a level 2 success criterion. 

* Having created the guideline we'll need to add it to HTML techniques.
There's definately gonna be a browser dependency here. For Mozilla, Opera,
and possibly others, we actually wouldn't need to impose any author
requirements - those browser scale even absolutely sized elements. But for
IE and others we would have to describe the unit types to avoid.

* Finally, we will have to answer the question about whether everything
needs to be relative sizes, or just fonts. Opinion is leaning towards just
fonts but there isn't a formal consensus. I would say definately fonts need
to be scalable, I'm on the fence about layout regions (I would like to
require them to be scalable in particular to avoid clipping if the font
scales but the layout region doesn't, but I don't know how solidly I could
defend that), and I'm pretty willing not to impose requirements on margins,
borders, padding, etc.

Received on Friday, 30 April 2004 16:43:17 UTC