Re: Proposal: font-size: auto

Windy Road wrote:

> I would like to propose a new "auto" value for the "font-size"
> property.  When set the broswer would try to automatically set the
> font-size, based on the element width, margins and padding ( (e.g.
> width: 50em; margin: 1em; padding: 1em).

em is defined in terms of the (new) font size!!

This is likely to result in very small fonts, which will increase the 
number of people turning off author font sizing, if not also accompanied 
by a minimum font size.  The minimum font size will mean that you cannot 
rely on the content fitting the container.

Like many recent proposals, it is incompatible with incremental 
rendering (whilst noting that some accepted proposals are also 
incompatible).

Overall, my feeling is that this is a page description language feature, 
where layout is much more fixed than authors  should reasonably expect 
for HTML/CSS.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Monday, 4 June 2007 07:56:58 UTC