- From: Hoffman, Geoffrey <ghoffman@aztrib.com>
- Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 09:48:14 -0700
- To: Jim Byrne <j.byrne@gcal.ac.uk>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hello Jim, I don't have time right now to go through your whole book - from what I saw, great resource! But I didn't find a section where you covered this. One thing I noticed in my own development is that (this only seems to affect MS Internet Explorer) if you encode the font sizes in your page using percentages, the ability to resize the text on-the-fly (view -> text size -> smallest, smaller, medium, larger, largest) is "dampened"; whereas if you encode font sizes using ems, the ability to resize text on-the-fly is "amplified". Although most online typography resources seem to indicate that ems are the preferred size unit, it's apparent that this can be used to advantage for certain purposes... In other words, even when it seems like they should be the same, IE treats its own internal text scaling quite differently for % vs. em. If you have something set for 100%, 120%, and 150%, the font-zooming lets you increase/decrease the size of text only marginally; whereas if you set 1.0 em; 1.2 em; and 1.5 em; the font zooming lets you increase/decrease the size of text drastically. I discovered this while performing a variety of tests. Perhaps you did also - but thought I'd pass along the info just in case. In my case, I had programmed a web page using ems, but IE allowed the font to be scaled down so far as to be useless, and so huge that the design was destroyed. After some tweaking using % shrunk the zoom range and allowed some alteration by the user and preserved the site design. As a comparison, your site http://www.scotconnect.com/webtypography/ probably uses ems, whereas www.eastvalleytribune.com (admittedly not a very accessible site) uses %. Try zooming down to 'smallest' on your site vs. mine and you'll immediate see why this became an issue for me. It's not an issue at all with Netscape or Opera, as their page-scaling mechanism works an entirely different way. But if your audience is largely composed on Internet Explorer users (who's isn't?), you ought to consider using percentage-based text sizing. Geoffrey D. Hoffman Lead Web Developer Arizona Interactive Media Group > -----Original Message----- > From: Jim Byrne [mailto:j.byrne@gcal.ac.uk] > Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 3:19 AM > > 'Accessible Web Typography - an > introduction for web designers is now online at > http://www.scotconnect.com/webtypography/
Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2004 11:54:02 UTC