Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/14/05 22:51

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, dingbat@codesmiths.com wrote:

> > From what I can tell, this is because browsers (IE especially) have
> > the default text size set to be quite large.
>
> IE users should be beaten with sticks until they stop it.

Hey, they have *paid* Bill to set that size for them!! If there's a
reason to beat them with sticks, it's /not/ for having the wrong text
size - but for the /other/ thing.

But seriously; if you were a distributor of OSes to the general public,
wouldn't *you* also err on the large side? At least then you have some
confidence that most users can read it, even if some of them will rate it
as too large.

Even Bill seems to be vulnerable to the belief that, if the users don't
like it, they could find their way to the "View> Text Size" menu to change
it. As you may have noticed elsegroup today, not everyone trusts them to
be able to do that, though :-{ (not me, Guv).

At risk of stating the obvious, a flexible design should be able to adapt
to those who consented to having text larger than they really wanted,
without doing harm to those who've made "the choice" (i.e 1.0em =
preferred body text size). So don't worry about it, it's just another of
those expected variations in browsing situation.

good luck

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