Posted by Andy Dingley on 11/14/06 16:17

Bergamot wrote:

> Andy Dingley wrote:
>
> [re: text zoom]
>
> > FF is perhaps short-sighted and I
> > hope that improved web practice will soon make this feature an
> > anachronism, in favour of returning to how IE does things.
>
> I don't follow this at all. How is FF short-sighted? It lets the user
> set their default text size to whatever they want,

CSS is designed around relative (like ems or %) and absolute units
(like pixels or points) for text sizing. Relative units should be under
user control, absolute units shouldn't be. Of course this also means
that a careless web designer will compromise accessibility if they use
an absolute unit.

In an ideal world the browsers would work like IE (relative is
controllable, absolute stays fixed) and web sites would be written
solely around relative units. A few tasks (prrinted layouts,
pixel-perfect screen positioning) would be done with absolute units
because their rigidity was more important that accessibility - we'd
accept that in a very small set or rare but real cases.

As the reality is that web design frequently uses pixels, then FF has
deliberately broken a CSS guideline on how browsers should size text by
allowing absolute text sizes to vary under user control in just the
same way as the relative sizes. This is annoying for those rare web
designers who do use each unit carefully and appropriately, but it's
understandable why they've done it.

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