Re: Hey Microsoft! cool it with CSS points ok?

>The danger of specifying point units in CSS is compounded by their use with
>special fonts, whose legibility characteristics at any nominal point size
>are better than average, like "big looking" Verdana (and most of the other

One of the points in favor of Verdana. All the new MS fonts are "big
looking." It does create a problem for designers when they may not have a
way of relating the choice of font to the font-size. Or to relating the
length of lines to the font size (perhaps when em support is more universal
this will go away).
>More to the point, these sizing issues would go away if CSS authors (and
>their corporate sponsors) would make it a policy not to use point or pixel
>units for type in Web pages. These units render inconsistently, so any

Yes, that would be ideal. But I have resorted to point-sizes for one of my
help files because there is no cross-browser support for percent or em
values. I want to use percent or em but find it difficult given the buggy
IE3.x and so forth.

>illusion of greater control is, well, illusory, and finally unfriendly.
>Speaking of unfriendly, have you all noticed that IE4 shipped without the
>font size adjustment thingie on the toolbar? There's almost enough here for
>a conspiracy theory, or maybe a Ralph Nader crusade.... :^)

Yes, again, I noticed the omission and am critical of it. However, after
attempting several designs using absolute positioning, I have concluded
they omitted because allowing user to change font-size can distort or make
such designs unreadable. If you create areas using percent, they may
display in ways that are not controllable. If you tie the sizing to em,
then you risk the changes introduced by font-resizing. I have settled on
points for now.

This becomes important when the only solution to replacing tables for
multi-columns is absolute positioning, if multi-column is cut from CSS2.

Steve

   _/ Steve Knoblock                      mailto:editor@city-gallery.com
   _/ City Gallery                            http://www.city-gallery.com/
   _/ Member NSA               http://www.3d-web.com/nsa/nsa.htm

Received on Monday, 24 November 1997 12:36:43 UTC