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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/25/63 11:49
On Sat, 3 Jun 2006, Jud McCranie wrote:
> Thanks, that worked. Just guessing, I replaced:
> 10pt -> 40%
> 12pt -> 50%
> 16pt -> 80%
> 18pt -> 90%
>
> The 40% is way too small.
Certainly is. Some would rate 65% as marginal, and only to be used
for stuff that /has/ to be there but few will want to read ("the small
print").
But stop thinking of specific physical sizes as your base, and
percentages as some kind of poor substitute which you're trying to
equivalence by experiment.
On the web, percentages (or em units, which are effectively
equivalent) *are* your base, and physical sizes are only what comes
out at the end, after /your/ size proposals have been through the
/reader's/ configuration settings (of default font and size, of text
zoom, of enforced minimum font setting, and so on). Any other attempt
is madness. The absolute size units such as pt have their reason for
existing, e.g for printing; but for web display in arbitrary viewing
situations unknown to the author, they are desperately
counter-productive - and would continue to be so even if they were
implemented to specification, which they generally are not.
> I can experiment around with it a little,
Yes, but you're only one reader (as is each of us, of course). You
can't predict what other readers want or need. So personal
experiments are inevitably flawed. But two-fifths of the reader's
chosen (linear) size for normal text (100% or 1.0em) is certainly too
small.
> but are there any guidelines for the percentages? Is > 100%
> allowed?
Is there online documentation for CSS? Is there a sample stylesheet
written by W3C specialists, to peruse as some kind of starting
point?
Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine working with something new on
the basis of mere experiments - I'd always want to know where to find
the reference documentation, and some respectable samples or tutorials
to get started.
Oh, the answers to the two questions are "yes" and "yes". The nearest
we've got to a currently appropriate reference for CSS is the 2.1
"working draft": http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ , and it has an appendix
with a suggested default stylesheet for HTML, which you might consider
at least as a sample of CSS in practice, even if you don't want to
follow that style: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/sample.html
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