- From: Todd Fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 11:40:14 -0700
- To: Rowland Shaw <Rowland.Shaw@seagatesoftware.com>, "'webmaster@richinstyle.com'" <webmaster@richinstyle.com>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
> > > Under Win systems: Control panel -> Display properties -> Settings -> >Font > > > size (small = 72 dpi screen res, large = 96dpi screen res) This isn't so. Under Windows, small fonts = 96ppi logical res; large fonts = 120ppi. It's the Mac that has a traditional 72ppi logical res. All of these are quite likely to be wrong for most displays, which is one reason that points are not useful for screen use. If you feel compelled nevertheless to use points, make sure that no text works out to less than 9pt if you want it to be legible to many Mac users. It's not a question of the size of the characters on screen - they might be 10m high each - it's that there will be insufficient pixels to draw upper- and lower-case roman text recognizably, without clogging up the counters. I've got MacIE5 configured correctly to use a 115.5 ppi logical resolution (matching the actual physical res). My preferred font size is 14px (x-height: 7px) for this configuration. I can always tell the bozo sites using points immediately: they're the ones with the absurdly huge fonts. Like CNN, which sniffs my UA string, assumes that I don't/won't/can't/shouldn't configure my UA correctly, and proceeds to serve up "default compensated" CSS containing point units. And some that should know better, like XML.com. It's a good thing MacIE5's got text zoom; I have to reduce to 75% to read these sites unless I'm across the room. In 20/20 hindsight, I think, absolute units should never have been made permissible for the screen media type, and pixels should have been permissible only on the root element (e.g., HTML). This way users could override the value on the root element as necessary in user stylesheets to scale all relatively-sized children (including raster art), without having to depend on the rare good sense of implementors to provide magic (non-CSS-based) UI stuff like Zooming. (Assuming inheritance worked into, e.g., table elements, which it doesn't in the leading implementations, and that non-CSS-based presentation prefs UI were formally deprecated, with user CSS UI becoming a conformance requirement. But 1996's technopolitical climate would not have permitted such a saving degree of specification for CSS-1.) -- Todd Fahrner Web UI Technologist Metrius
Received on Thursday, 27 July 2000 14:42:16 UTC