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Re: CSS Units of Measurement

for

From: Tim Beadle
Date: Feb 19, 2004 2:40AM

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 11:05:59AM +0200, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Exercise in futility, since anyone who still surfs using NN4 is either
> interested in content only, not visual appearance, or doesn't know what he
> is doing and inevitably experiences lots of problems. In the first case he
> has probably disabled JavaScript, thereby disabling the quasi-CSS support
> too. If not, should we really punish him by enforcing our guesses on the
> suitable font size upon him?

Until late last year, our entire company used NN4 (thankfully now replaced with
NN7). They were interested in more than just content. I think you have made a
dangerous and sweeping generalisation there.

> Besides, you never know when your "NN 4 only" stylesheet suddenly
> affects rendering on other browsers.

Fair point. You would need to make sure that you override every declaration in
the advanced style sheet, and test, test, test.

> Keyword sizes are inconsistently and vaguely defined and even wrongly
> implemented on some still relevant browsers. Why would you use them then?

If you use the Tantek hack with the right DocType, you can get acceptable size
consistency across modern browsers.

I don't mean "smaller", "larger" etc; I mean xx-small through xx-large. Apart
from IE's incorrect rendering (fixable with Tantek's hack) they have a
well-defined meaning in modern browsers, as browser makers have standardised on
96dpi screen resolution and 16px default font size. Have you actually used
this method? I have, and have been happy, as have clients, with the result in
IE5+. NN6+, Safari, IE5 Mac, Mozilla/Camino/Firefox etc.

> If you are happy with making something smaller or larger with just a vague
> idea of what that might mean, use <small> and <big> in HTML. Beware though
> that they should be used with caution and understanding, since their
> effect will not disappear when the IE user tells the browser to ignore
> font sizes set on Web pages. IE treats them as if they were really logical
> rather than physical markup, which is, pragmatically, not as bad an idea
> as it might sound on first sight.

Isn't that presentational markup, rather than structural? What does "big" or
"small" mean to a screen reader?

> If you wish to make specific suggestions on relative font sizing, use
> font-size with percentage value, and avoid getting below 75% or above
> 150%. Watch out for the effects of nested elements with such settings.

I thought only NN4 did this nesting effect, which I've taken out of the
equation by using px in an NN4-only style sheet!

> On IE 6, yes. (Thanks for pointing this out. I had forgotten this when I
> recently wrote down a list of what the intentionally broken mode,
> known as "quirks" mode, actually does.)

No problem.

> On IE 5 (on Windows), the user always gets the equivalent of "Quirks"
> mode, i.e. all so-called absolute keywords as font-size values are
> horrendously wrongly interpreted.

It's a dog, isn't it? The sooner the world starts using Firefox, the better ;)

Regards,

Tim

--
"I don't need a blogging tool or an aggregator or designer or ashtray or
car stereo built into my web browser. I just need it to display web pages
properly." -- Kevin Daly


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