font sizes in HTML

It seems I am plagued by unreadably small font on various
(mostly commercial) websites. Is it just me, or what ?

I'm running Netscape 4.7 on Linux with X11Free86. I have my
Western font set to 14pt Times, which is a comfortable reading size
that puts maximum information on my screen, for HTML that does not
use font tags or scaling. As I understand things this would
be <font size=3>, or style "font-size"medium".
Many sites seem to be using font size=1 for some normal content - stuff
they expect you to read - which is almost unreadable for me. Netscape 4
offers no zoom function (though Netscape 6 does) so I end up doing a
copy/paste to a text window (or going to a different site).
I would have expected the smallest available font to be used only for
copyright notices, footnotes etc. which were not part of the normal
content.

Is it that browsers on other platforms have an unusually large default
font size which noone figures out how to change, or is the scaling
between the fonts different? I see somewhere a note that
in CSS1, the suggested scaling factor between adjacent indexes was 1.5
and it's been changed to 1.2 in CSS2

-- 
Andrew Daviel

Received on Monday, 5 March 2001 03:08:38 UTC