[www.kde.org] [Bug 317553] www.kde.org webpages should not set font-size of unstyled body text and should comply with 100% Easy-2-Read Std

[Felix Miata]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317553

--- Comment #13 from Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> ---
(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #4)
> > (In reply to comment #2)
> > > users favourites are something between 6px and 20px... 

> > No one's favorite font is 6px, or 7px, or even 8px. The most commonly used
> > fonts require at least 8px to fully form a glyph. Most font families require
> > a minimum size of 9px to fully form all available glyphs. On several of my
> > installations the _minimum_ allowed font size in web pages is 20px.

> Wow, then you must have a seriously different user group. Instead, i got a
> lot of complaints in the early phase about too big fonts. And they were not
> even close to 20px, rather around 14px (but em based).

Early phase of what?

Most people who complain about too big fonts haven't personalized their
personal computing environment to match their own needs or preferences.

It looks to me like when you wrote "6px, or 7px, or even 8px" what you must
have meant was pt rather than px. On 96 DPI desktops, there's a 3:4
relationship between pt and px. 16px is 12pt. But when the DPI is something
else, that ratio changes. 12pt becomes 20px @ 120 DPI, 24px @ 144 DPI, and 32px
@ 192 DPI. Take a look for yourself using
http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Font/font-dejaserif.html on multiple systems running
at DPIs that vary from 96, in addition to 96 that is actually on a 96 DPI
display rather than forced to 96 by Xorg configuration. When I open it here on
displays that closely match a display's physical pixel density of 90 or more,
the letterforms need to be at least 10ppem for there to be non-zero space
between every letter pair. When the device DPI and DE DPI are disparate, as a
96 DPI DE on a 32" 1920x1080 device, 6px & 7px are essentially just blobs of
color, 8px starts looking like letters, and 9px starts to become legible if
viewed at half or less of the recommended viewing distance for such a device
size, all using a western character set. For CJK fonts considerably more px are
required for legibility.

This is a very old issue, discussed by the early CSS developers such as at
http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/dump.html, which may be the first
mention of the oft cited
http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/font_wars.GIF that demonstrates
what 8px and 9px fonts typically looked (and still look) like on common desktop
displays. Even then people were being warned of the legibility problems to come
from using the newly supported CSS sizing in px or pt. For web page text, pt
and px have acquired a fixed 1:1 ratio in most browsers, making the problems
the same regardless which is used to ignore user defaults, legibility and
reading comfort.

> > They don't work properly now. They produce a rude product hard on users. An
> > appropriate set of CMS themes and a firm policy of respecting users will not
> > cause maintenance horror.

> i won't let it up to the user that much, else you end up with
> sidebars that 
> lo
> ook

> a
> bit
> like
> this

There's no good reason for that to happen. That ever happens as a consequence
of px sizing instead of relative sizing of the sidebar. Competent relative
sizing means sidebars are a width fixed in relation to their content instead,
such as shown by this simple example page: http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Sites/Ksc/

There, given enough viewport width, proportions of all content are perfectly
maintained through a wide range of browser default sizes, and nobody with a
browser default set to maximize his own reading comfort will have any
accessibility reason to zoom or unzoom to change size of anything therein
contained.

> 20px... that is not workable here.

What's not workable is sizing in px and pt. Both entirely disregard the wide
range of actual user needs and environments. What works on your display with
you looking at it is poorly representative of all who want or need to use
kde.org.

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