Posted by Jim Higson on 11/19/33 11:26

Neredbojias wrote:

> With neither quill nor qualm, Jim Higson quothed:
>
>>
>> Most sites seem to use smaller text smaller than the user's default for
>> their content. Not just badly designed sties - a lot of the very
>> beautiful pages on CSS Zen Garden have text at 80% or smaller. From what
>> I can tell, this is because browsers (IE especially) have the default
>> text size set to be quite large.
>>
>> Now, if users are used to text being set to 80% in CSS, they will set
>> their default size to 120% or so, thus getting it back up to a sane size.
>> I do this: I like reading 10px text, but if I keep that as the default I
>> have to hit Ctrl-plus for every site, so I set my browser to use size 14.
>>
>> When designing sites I like to respect the users' preferences, and have
>> always thought the main content should be the default size, but once
>> users have compensated for every other site using 60~90% for their
>> default text this is making the text on my sites look large and out of
>> place. Plus there are many IE users who don't realise they can change
>> their default text size and just wonder why my text is so large.
>>
>> The "font-size:80%" phenomenon seems to be a larger problem among web
>> designers of following the letter of the spec (validating HTML etc) but
>> not in the spirit by actually using the tools as intended.
>>
>> What to do?
>
> Go out drinking. In lieu of that

Can't I do both?

> , if you're capable at javascript, you
> can detect the actual size of text on users' browsers and adjust it
> accordingly. (Javascript users only, of course.)

Ok, I'd say I'm capable at Javascript.
Check out my pet project beta (in Gecko)
http://81.5.150.113/wysi

It'll be released proper pretty soon.

> Example:
>
> http://www.neredbojias.com/alpha/rextex.html

This is interesting, but I'm not certain what they're doing is what I want.
They're resizing the text to always only just fill the page without
scrolling. I don't think this'd work very well for my 700 word articles.

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