tangent to Re: Inline forms in CSS problem

[Thomas Dowling]

At 12:34 PM 2/26/2002, Nancy Sosna Bohm wrote:
> > [First things first: "font-size: 10px;" is bad.  You don't know how small
> > 10px is on the user's monitor.  Stick with relative sizes.]
>
>Are px's really so bad in CSS?

Yes.
>It seems that if the user has their pixels
>set really high, they expect teeny tiny fonts.


No.  They expect really *clear* fonts, made up of many more pixels per 
character than lower-resolution users get.  They *may* choose to trade off 
some of that clarity to use slightly smaller onscreen fonts (in point 
size), but not necessarily.

Fixed font sizing, whatever the unit of measurement, is also grossly unfair 
to users with vision problems.  Sure, the author's sizing can be 
overridden, but why force that drastic action if it isn't otherwise necessary?


>The relative sizes seem
>almost arbitrary across different platforms.

Regardless of platform, text that is accurately rendered at, say, 90% of 
the user's comfortable font size is still legible for short, de-emphasized 
text.  Text rendered at  x number of pixels has no known relationship to a 
user's comfortable font size.

Perhaps you're referring to a bugs in a browser whose error-riddled CSS 
support is now over five years old, and whose own developers declared it 
defunct more than three years ago.  The pages I write are usable in such a 
dilapidated browser, but I no longer go far out my way to fine tune its 
display.



Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu