Re: font-size in W3C stylesheet

At 9:09 PM -0700 9/2/99, Susan Lesch wrote:
>Text drawn in the copyright class in the W3C WD stylesheet [1] is illegible
>from a Macintosh, in MSIE or Netscape with default settings. This is easy
>to see from any Mac in the XHTML Extended Forms draft [2].
>
>The culprit is the following line.

[snip]

>
>                  P.copyright { font-size: smaller }

While it is true that there is currently no good way to suggest 
smaller fonts in a WAI-conscious manner for any shipping Mac UA, I 
would hardly lay blame on W3C CSS authors for this. Instead, I would 
petition UA developers to implement the CSS keyword system in a 
thoughtful fashion, computing a different table of font size keyword 
values depending on the pixels-per-em of the user's preferred 
"medium" font. When the user's "medium" is the historical MacOS 
default of 12 pixels (=points), then the only possible means of 
representing the smaller keywords distinctly and legibly is as 
follows:

   medium: 12px
    small: 11px
  x-small: 10px
xx-small:  9px  <--minimum legible size

Note that the scaling interval here is considerably less than the 
CSS2-suggested 1.2/.83 value.

More on this:
http://style.verso.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html

Received on Friday, 3 September 1999 01:25:37 UTC