font sizes overhaul

[Bert Bos]

On Wednesday 27 October 2004 19:46, Germain Garand wrote:

> I started some work some time ago to bring CSS 2.1 conformance on
> font-sizes (*). The attached patch is the outcome of that work.

Nice! But maybe not enough:

In fact, the CSS working group just decided to remove the table of 
scaling factors from CSS 2.1. It potentially does more harm than good. 
(And Todd Fahrner's article is too long to include in the 
specification.)

The problem is that the scaling factors given by CSS 2.1 are meant for 
when 'medium' (the user's normal font size) is 16px or greater. But for 
smaller sizes it is better to not use these factors, but hard-code the 
pixel sizes that Todd Fahrner computed. That avoids that 'xx-small' 
ever gets below 9px.

Several other browsers also contain such a table of sizes for 9px <= 
medium <= 16px.

> I owe much to this article for providing a clear and thorough
> explanation on font sizes problems:
> http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html

I just learned that the source code of Mozilla actually contains a link 
to it :-)

> (*) http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-size-props



Bert
-- 
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