on text size...


Most sites seem to use smaller text smaller than the user's default for
their content. Not just badly designed sties - a lot of the very beautiful
pages on CSS Zen Garden have text at 80% or smaller. From what I can tell,
this is because browsers (IE especially) have the default text size set to
be quite large.

Now, if users are used to text being set to 80% in CSS, they will set their
default size to 120% or so, thus getting it back up to a sane size. I do
this: I like reading 10px text, but if I keep that as the default I have to
hit Ctrl-plus for every site, so I set my browser to use size 14.

When designing sites I like to respect the users' preferences, and have
always thought the main content should be the default size, but once users
have compensated for every other site using 60~90% for their default text
this is making the text on my sites look large and out of place. Plus there
are many IE users who don't realise they can change their default text size
and just wonder why my text is so large.

The "font-size:80%" phenomenon seems to be a larger problem among web
designers of following the letter of the spec (validating HTML etc) but not
in the spirit by actually using the tools as intended.

What to do?
Jim
.

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