Re: [css21] Appendix D default style sheet for HTML

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004, J.Jeka wrote:

> I have some (little) problems with CSS 2.1 CR.

I'm afraid the problems are not that small.

> 1. Recomended line-height

This is a long and sad story. CSS specifications, drafts, and "errata"
have presented different recommendations and examples on this, sometimes
even with internal contradictions.

All this should be omitted. There's no compelling reason to make any
suggestions on this, any more than the specifications make recommendations
on default font family. It would have been useful if specifications had
consistently recommended a reasonable default value, like 1.3, and
browsers had implemented this. But it's too late now.

It probably won't be changed, so just ignore anything the spec says about
specific line-height values.

> But what all popular UAs use is  line-height: 1.2  -isn't it?

Roughly so. You can check their browser style sheets to make sure.
(Just kidding. The accuracy of browser documentation reflects the
value of recommendations on default browser style sheets pretty well, I'm
afraid.)

> 2. Recomended font-size of headings, scaling factors for font-size

A very similar case. In practice, you have to study actual browser
behavior to get useful information, and for your own style sheet design,
you should simply write suggested font sizes for headings, expecting
strange defaults. The CSS recommendations and proposals
just obscure the situation.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 27 March 2004 18:46:13 UTC