[CSS21]-relevant: Opera-bug 122147 (font-sizes)

Brief summary of the problem encountered:

 

Opera switching from one font-size-bug to another ...


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How severe is the problem?

Significant


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In what part of Opera does it occur?

Display


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What URL triggers this bug, if any?

Build your own CSS-absolute-font-sizes-page; or search Google for common
absolute-CSS-font-size using sites ...


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Describe the bug in detail

Within Opera 7.11 you changed from emulating the IE5.x-behaviour for
CSS-using pages with absolute font-size-property-values to the
Mozilla-behaviour. Right?

Yes, it was a bug within IE's CSS-implementation not to set "medium" (but
"small") as "initial" value of the font-size-property. But no, it was not a
bug to make {font-size: small;} equivalent of font size="3" and {{font-size:
medium;} equivalent of font size="4". It is rather a bug both within Mozilla
(and latest IE/Opera) and within Todd Fahrner's CSS2.1-proposal to think
that "medium" would be equivalent to "normal" (which it is neither
semantically nor logically, it's nothing more than "in the middle") alias
font size="3". Both "medium" and "initial" do say nothing about being
"normal". It's just out of any logic to give 3 sizes below "normal" alias
"the size in which long texts are displayed usually" (where it's simply
impossible to create 3 sizes that are both still readable and of visible
size-difference) but only 3 sizes above "normal" (which makes it impossible
to creaty e.g. well-structured science-publications or math-typogrophy when
using absolute font-size property values).

So instead of switching from an IE-bug-emulation to a
Mozilla-/Todd-Fahrner-bug-emulation you should:
1) behave logically -
1a) make {font-size: medium;} the initial value which both CSS1 and CSS2 ak
for, but don't think this would mean medium=normal=font size="3",
1b) instead make (again) medium=4 and small=3 so that you have all
font-sizes within the range they belong and are needed for stuctured texts,
2) tell your guy(s) within the w3c-style-working-group (namely Håkon Wium
Lie <howcome@opera.com>) that Todd Fahrner's font-size-workaround proposal
is
2a) wrong, illogical and counter-productive in the
structured-(x)html-practice (there's simply no really visible difference
between font-sizes xx-small, x-small, and small; at the same time there is a
forth above-normal-size missing for highly-structured documents and
math-typography, and the visible difference between medium, large, x-large,
and xx-large is _too_ big),
2b) while the proposal is also a big time-(and resources-)waste and simply
adds further confusion, since any problems that arose from the difference
between IE/Opera's and Mozilla's traditional behaviours/CSS-implementations
can be completely solved by just spelling out clearly that small=3 and
medium=4 (which leaves medium=initial unaffected and unchanged since
"initial" is totally different from "normal" - both in logic and semantics;
initial is just the inherited value for an unset/unaltered property).
2c) So please tell Håkon and his friends that CSS 2.1's
January-28th-Working-Draft has a rather _bad_ and completely unnecessary
workaround within its subsection "15.7 Font size: the 'font-size' property"
(http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-size-props).

Bold remark: This is _not_ personally against Todd Fahrner (or anyone else)
who may be a great guy. (I just don't know him.) It's just about
reasonability and requirements of visual differenciation within structured
documents.


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Describe the steps needed to reproduce this bug

1. Build four stylesheets,

a) one emulating the old IE-/Opera-implementation (IE-bug) of CSS1/CSS2
(small=initial, small=3, medium=4, so that _above_h1=xx-large=7,
h1=x-large=6, h2=large=5, h3=medium=4, body=p=h4=small=3,
h5=code=...=x-small=2, h6=xx-small=1),

b) one emulating the old Netscape-/Mozilla-tradition (medium=initial,
small=2, medium=3, so that there's _nothing_ above h1 --and no
7-equivalent--, h1=xx-large=6, h2=x-large=5, h3=large=4, body=p=h4=medium=3,
h5=code=...=small=2, h6=x-small=1, _below!_h6=xx-small=_below!_1),

c) one emulating Todd Fahrner's proposal (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-size-props - x-small _between_
h6=1 and h5=2, _nothing_ above h1, _no equivalent of font size="7",
_completely different_ percentage-steps within the size-interval leading to
visual confusion),

d) and one implementing straight logic (medium=initial, small=3, medium=4,
which also results in initial=4 so that CSS: body {font-size: small;} would
fit well into any longer-text-document's stylesheet, and of course this line
should be in this forth test-stylesheet, resulting in the same as the first
stylesheet with the only difference that CSS1/CSS2 --initial=medium-- is
fulfilled).

2. Create a document with highly (and correctly, means headlines_level1=h1
etc.) structured text-content, e.g. a graduation, incl. math- or
chemistry-typography, using clean and only phrase tags (you know: p, h1-h6
and the like), no presentation-only .classes/tags (like "bigger"); at the
end create 7 seperate paragraphes using each of the 7 absolute font-size
property values specifically.

3. Apply all the four stylesheets to this document, one at a time, and watch
the results, especially look for the smaller (h6, xx-small ...) and bigger
(h1, xx-large ...) text-parts and for the visual differences between the
various structure-levels (and for their visual difference-interval).

4. As a bonus, search for a couple of common web pages/sites using CSS1/CSS2
with absolute font-size property values and look how they render when
emulating
a) IE's former bug
b) Netscape's/Mozilla's bug
c) Todd Fahrner's CSS2.1-proposal
d) straight and simple logic (see above) which complies both with the
CSS1/CSS2 specs and with common users' and common sites' (IE-)"tradition"
(read: with  reality) ...


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bug report

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