Date: 03/21/08 (WebDesign)    Keywords: browser, html, asp

I love the idea of font-size-adjust and its aid to legibility. But I'm having a problem about how to apply it in practice.

Let's say I define .signature { font-family: Venice, Genoa, cursive; } in my stylesheet. Venice happens to have a .415 aspect. Should I specify that here? I understand that this will scale the fallback cursive font (if Venice and Genoa are missing) to the metrics I am looking for. Great so far.

The problem I foresee is that I have not specified the font/size/size-adjust to be used generally, relying on the users' defaults—a good usability practice. Therefore I don't know what aspect it has. If we assume (for discussion) the browser is set to use Verdana (aspect .58) my Venice looks far too small to begin with. So what does it matter if the substitutes match Venice, because none of them are going to match Verdana.

How do I always scale as appropriate to match an unknown font aspect? Can I simply use font-size-adjust:inherit whenever I change the font, or do I need to? The W3 says the initial value for this property is none, though the value is inherited, so can I rely on the (arbitrary) parent element to have the correct value or not? If there is no initial value, what am I inheriting? I could apply a font-size-adjust to BODY (or HTML…which is preferred?) so that I do have a basis, but if the user's chosen font didn't have the same aspect, I'd be throwing off his preference for font size, right?

Please help me clarify what the best practices for using this property are!

x-posted

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdesign/1371173.html