Re: Can cascading work?

William M. Perry wrote:
>   This will really only help with well-written author stylesheets.  I
> haven't done a sampling, but if anybody has, I'd be interested in the
> percentage of sheets that actually _use_ relative font sizing versus
the 'I
> want this 26pt, dammit' philosophy.

"26pt" _is_ relative on a computer display. A display resolves to
pixels, not points, and the displayed size of a point should be
adjustable in the UI.

I think defense of cascading stylesheets on behalf of the visually
impaired is a bit specious. A graphical web browser typically uses an
operating system's UI, and adjustments for accessibility -- including
contrast enhancement -- need to be done globally.

Just for the hell of it, I set my 82 ppi display as 300 pixels per inch
in Win95. Text spec'd as 10pt then measures more than 36pt at the
display surface, and is quite legible from 15ft away. (Text spec'd in
pixels and most bitmaps do not change, but, surprisingly, some of the
icons are resized.)

(WARNING!!! for anyone who wants to try this: Be sure you know how to
navigate the dialog box for setting the display using the keyboard. The
dialog box becomes much larger than the display area, and you will not
be able to see the controls that you used to make the adjustment! You
will be stuck with huge type FOREVER!!!)

The point is, stylesheets are not the place where visually-impaired
people will adjust their display, because without a sufficiently
adjusted display they won't be using a browser at all.

David Perrell

Received on Thursday, 24 April 1997 11:48:49 UTC