font sizes overhaul

[Germain Garand]

Hello,

Le Mercredi 03 Novembre 2004 13:49, Bert Bos a écrit :
> 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.)
>

ah, seeing how well the normalized scale behaves, this is really a pity...

it may indeed lead to unreadable font-sizes for vey small ppem values, but 
that very detail was mentioned in Note 1 to the table, so why remove it?
I saw it as a huge step forward considering previous inconsistencies... ;(

> 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.

Actually, I considered implementing the compensated scales, but given that we 
have a user-defined minimum font size setting (with a sane default of 7pt), 
this is in practice not an issue for any medium size above 12 pixels per em.

It is true however that for a value of 12ppem (or below if this is even 
conceivable), we would have identical font-sizes for xx-small and x-small at 
our default settings, so I'll look to implement the corresponding compensated 
scale.

Greetings,
Germain