Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Jonas Petersson wrote:
> > Kyle Barrow wrote:
> > > ...
> > > to a page that:
> > > 1. Uses font tags. Font tag size differ greatly between browsers an=
d
> > > platforms.
> > ...
> > 5. Is readable without any fiddling for the visitor.
> =
> Pages that use font tags are often *not* readable without fiddling for
> the visitor. The sizes that font tags produce vary drastically from
> browser to browser, and it's much harder to fix this problem from eithe=
r
> the server or client end when using directly embedded font tags than it=
> is when using CSS.
As we have seen in this particular case (as well as elsewhere) the
problem still remains and is often even worse with CSS due to the fact
that fonts are represented differently in different operating systems
(and even different browsers). What happens in good cases is that the
site has several different CSSes and chose the appropriate one for each
browser. In most cases there is just one CSS which works OK with a
recent IE for recent Windows.
For my part, I try to only use relative font sizes in small steps in my
tags - this should be pretty safe IMHO.
I'm quite aware of the problem and I *DO* practice what I preach. For
example you can try this site: http://www.aforms.net/ - use the demo
account. (It's quite similar to the Keitai archive, but instead of
archiving emails it archives Anoto pen pages.)
This site goes perfectly through the W3C validator (well it did when we
built it anyway, some minor issues may have shown up since then) and it
works just fine in older browsers (for instance NS 4.7 with and without
CSS) and in recent Mozilla/IE/Safari. Sure, it doesn't look quite
identical, but close enough. (BTW: I didn't choose the layout nor did I
produce the tables - I just sorted them out to work). In fact, it is
pretty usable even in Lynx (although that was not really a design goal).
Note that the base layout is done with base HTML while "frills" are
added with CSS - it is not easy to tell for the demo user, but site
includes skins (you can access the site as for instance www.asales.se to
see a change) as well as branding (depending on LDAP group memberships)
- both of these can trigger changes int he base HTML (colors/images) as
well as switching CSSes. In this case we've tried to make sure the CSSes
stuff is not too complicated and therefore there is no need to use one
per OS/browser.
If you are clever you can probably dig out a few of our tests with the
soon the be released Nokia Digital Pen...
/ Jonas
-- =
Jonas Petersson | XMS Penvision | mailto:Jonas.Petersson@xms.se
Box 3294, V=E4stg=F6tegatan 13, S-600 03 Norrk=F6ping | http://www.xms.se=
/
Tel: +46 11 400 13 00 | Dir: +46 11 400 13 05 | Fax: +46 11 10 30 50
Received on Wed Sep 10 12:40:03 2003