Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / May 2008

That's fine. I had no expectation of you adopting all or even portions of it
without changes. Some portions were put to produce discussion here. :-)

What I wrote was "All Windows OEM browsers are factory set “factory set” to
12pt". What I meant to write was "All Windows OEM browsers are factory set to
<em>nominal</em> 12pt". What I meant to write is a fact carved in stone. All
Windows OEM browsers are various versions of Internet Explorer, all of which
always have their medium text size set to nominal 12pt by Microsoft. This is
something vendors never change, so it's just a fact that IE always comes this
way, and only an IE has ever been the Windows OEM browser since back to the
original Windows 98 at least.

Users are free to switch their IE text size to something other than medium,
or goto advanced display settings and choose something other than 96 DPI, or
goto appearance and change the setting for font size to large or extra large
from normal, but this is not how they are ever factory set - with one very
big exception, which is that laptop vendors <em>often</em> change the DPI to 120.

Nevertheless, even when DPI is not 96, every web page that sets sizes in pt
will in IE6 or above in standards mode display 12pt text at the exact same
size that CSS medium is rendered. When the DPI is 120, it will still be 12pt,
even though at that DPI 12pt has become 20px instead of 16px. And this is the
proof that the IE default is 12pt and not 16px. Check with
http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/IE/font-default-IE96med.html and
http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/IE/font-default-IE120med.html or any similar page or
pages you like and you should see that the IE default is 12pt rather than
16px, or whatever px for other than 96 DPI.

Probably half the widescreen laptops for sale today and recently have had the
DPI set to 120. If the vendors weren't doing that, then the models that do it
would be outselling those that don't in a very big way, because on those
higher resolution screens the px are just too small for 96 to produce
legibility for average people.

Safari and Gecko do indeed have their sizes set in px, so users who install
them alongside IE on their 120 DPI laptops and compare pages between IE and
the others will see larger text  in IE than the others, as long as they don't
raise their defaults in the others to 20px to match the 20px that IE has
assigned to 12pt.

Note too that the ancient IE versions, those prior to v6 are even worse, and
so too are the newer versions when running in quirks mode. You can see the pt
to px translations according to versions on these pages:

http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/IE/absolute-sizes-IE6.html (applies also to v7)
http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/IE/absolute-sizes-IE5.html

In http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Moz/absolute-sizes-MvE.html you can see how
closely Gecko matches IE as long as DPI remains 96.

I suspected that, but put it in just in case it wasn't intentional.

Good, but maybe some kind of extra emphasis in certain places would be good too.

It is true that he does say in bold type "which I’m using purely because it’s
a nice round number for example purposes". The problem is that it isn't
really true within the context of the article, or in Rutter's real intent. If
you read on you should find that the whole strategy is closely tied to using
62.5. Indeed, if you had followed the many email lists discussing this
article, including those on which the author participated in thread
discussion about his page and its method, you would know this. Those several
lists, among them WSG, css-d & WD, which collectively, and some even
individually, commonly have traffic that far outnumbers the traffic on this
newsgroup, have often discussed that it is precisely the 62.5 and its 10px
equivalence that differentiates the Clagnut method from recommendations
elsewhere to set a size less than 100% on body and/or html and em upwards or
downwards accordingly from there. Just about every recommendation elsewhere
calls for more than 62.5, most commonly 76, and none of them do anything for
pixel and layout math but make it more convoluted.

So, that 62.5 = 10px is the answer to the question you beg "If designers
insist on setting type size smaller than the default, why do it this
roundabout way instead of leaving body text at 100%, and simply setting the
content block to 75% in the first place?".

My point controverted your original inference that Windows users were
helpless to do anything about the end of cascade effect in Gecko and Opera,
when the truth is that those with control over their puters do have the
option to use Safari instead.

Now as to new version http://www.bergamotus.ws/misc/sensible-css-text-sizing.html

Webkit and KHTML are not exactly the same thing. If you look at a Safari UA
string, you'll see a Safari version # and a Webkit version #, but no KHTML
version #. Because Webkit is a fork of KHTML, it is not the same thing, and
therefore it is technically incorrect to refer to KHTML in place of Webkit
when discussing Safari. Your opinion that Safari won't take significant share
on Windows ignores the share on Mac. Mac users browse the web too. Their
number is not insignificant, and their OS comes standard with Safari only,
just as doz comes with IE only. Safari appears to have roughly 4 times the
market share of Opera: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/April/browser.php
Note too that a not insignificant part of Firefox share comes from Linux,
while none of Safari's comes from Linux.

IMO, the word "monitor" when referring to a computer display has become an
anachronism.

I've never seen a page with font-size: 8px set on body or html. 8px cannot
produce fully formed characters throughout all standard character sets, as
that size character box simply has too few px to do it. Virtually all px
precisionist idiots are aware of this. I'm sure some of them would go even
smaller if they could. :-p

Most users of minimum size seem to set the default at their comfort level,
and the minimum as something less, which means text, while always legible,
will nevertheless often be too small for <em>comfort</em> while minimum size
is in effect.

Quite true. However, the problem is limited mainly to Opera users and the
idiot designers making their own jobs more complicated. Natural selection
should cull the number of those idiot desingers, eventually leading to the
takeover of sanity. Meanwhile, Opera is liable to see the light discovered by
Safari and Gecko.