Re: Firefox formatting glitch?

On 2011-05-28, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
...
There is both a lower and an upper limit to the number of characters per
line that humans find easily readable. Ask newspaper people.

Yes, there is, but don't (generally) ask newspaper people.
Newspaper column widths are almost always much narrower than the
minimum. I worked on one newspaper where the columns were reduced
in width in order to get an extra column on the page. Since
advertisers were charged by the column inch, this increased the
revenue from each page; legibility had nothing to do with it.

The optimum width, traslated to ems, is in the 30-40em range.

That links will fit in or be designed to fit in and the width of the
largest picture be taken account of. People do not use or read
sidebars in the same way as content.

You don't know what you are talking about. There is no inherent upper limit
as to how much text can be zoomed in a user agent.

Yes there is. Firefox, for example, allows only eight (I think)
increases in size.

There is also no requirement to use the author-specified fonts. And
this becomes a problem if there are long words, because they cannot
always be hypenated (sensibly).

What does the font have to do with that?

Not allowing the margins to grow in size with the font-size is
easily going to make a mess of the site, with text width exceeding
the boundaries of the box.

The problem was that the space available for text was *reduced*
when the font-size was increased. It didn't even remain the same
physical width; it shrunk!

--
Chris F.A. Johnson
<http://torontowebdesign.cfaj.ca/>
.