Re: Confusion over meaning of font-size

david,
that is very interesting material, I think that the chief problem is though
faulty implementation of the CSS spec. by the browser vendors.

It was certainly my understanding that in CSS the font size refered to the
cell and not the Glyph, and this is the definition in Windows. In other
words in a 12pt font the height of the cell should be one sixth of an inch
no matter what system we are playing with. Of course different screen
resolutions will vary the actual size we see.

Frank


----- Original Message -----
From: L. David Baron <dbaron@fas.harvard.edu>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 1999 3:01 PM
Subject: Confusion over meaning of font-size


>
> The CSS definition of font-size is different from the one used by many
> operating systems and/or font formats.  I'm not sure exactly where the
> problem lies.  However, a number of other things in CSS depend on font
> sizes (em units, backgrounds of inline elements, line-height), and
> different browsers compensate for the two different definitions of font
> size in different ways, causing rather serious incompatibilities.  In
> the current situation, implementation of font-size-adjust would be
> meaningless because different browsers would probably define x-height
> in different ways.
>
> I've written a test showing these problems and an explanation of how
> various browsers handle the problems, at:
>
> http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/css/fonts/sizes/
>
> I think this inconsistency needs to be addressed in some way so that
> presentational suggestions that are reasonable on one browser are not
> ridiculous on another.  I don't really have any thoughts on how to
> solve this without the serious backwards-compatibility problems that
> would be caused by going to the spec's definition, but I hope others
> here do.
>
> David
>
> L. David Baron      Freshman, Harvard      dbaron@fas.harvard.edu
> Links, SatPix, CSS, etc.  < http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
> WSP CSS AC                   < http://www.webstandards.org/css/ >
>
>

Received on Thursday, 13 May 1999 10:09:52 UTC