On 2009/04/27 16:50 (GMT+0200) Klistvud composed:
Thanx 2 all 4 answering and clearing that out. Now I'm beginning to
understand a bit more! ;)
@ Felix Miata: yes, my DPI does differ from the "average"; as indicated
by your html pages (as well as by xdpyinfo|grep resol), my DPI is 129
(it's a laptop widescreen LCD).
Thanx also for refreshing my memory about the differences between px,
pt, em, % and what not. It's been a while since I've last looked at a
source code of a html page...
But, to be more practical: what do you guys do (short of hitting ctrl
+) in order to get a decent rendering of pages such as:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64307
or
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/running-windows-smp-guests
On my laptop, those fonts appear extremely small:
Those are two sites designed by designers for designers, not for users. Those
sites' styles disregard user preferences entirely by sizing text (and
everything else) in px. No design account is taken of the preference settings
in users' browsers or DTEs. The designer assumption is that what he prefers
is good for everyone else. In most cases, the reality is much different, as
typical designers are young people with good eyesight and big computer
displays, hardly representative of average web users or laptop users.
The first thing you should do when encountering sites like those, if the site
is important to you, is to complain to the webmaster that his site styling
makes your web experience inferior. You can try pointing to a site like
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/web-fonts/ and/or
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size just in case all they did was copy from
someone else and don't really know what they did or understand why you are
complaining.
so far, my only way of permanently correcting this has been to increase the
"smallest font" in Iceweasel to around 14.
You've ignored the intended way. On the same preferences screen as the
"smallest font" are the preference sizes for proportional and monospace,
which are usually set to 16px and 12px or 13px. Because IW does not adjust
according to your desktop preferences or to DPI, when you run a high DPI,
these should be increased manually by you in proportion to the DPI increase
over 96. For 129 DPI, these would be 21.5 (22px) and 16.125 (16px) or 17.469
(17px).
Minimum is designed to be just that, the smallest permitted size, and is not
supposed to have any effect on your preference for basic size.
Is there a smarter/simpler way?
There is no really good way around designer imposition. Over 10 years ago
site designers were empowered to totally disregard user needs via the CSS
specs. Most seem to use every bit of that power to design for their own
tastes, and disregard user realities brought by increasing screen resolution
and decreasing eyesight that typically accompanies aging.
After a few years of this designer imposition on users a few defenses were
created, initially by the Mozilla and Opera developers, then adopted by others:
1-text zoom (later followed by full page zoom)
2-minimum font size
3-site style disabling
Note that even the just released IE8 still does not have minimum font size,
while even IE5 had a limited form of style disabling.
Remember, these are defense mechanisms, not true solutions, and they do have
their flaws. Other defenses installable via extension also exist. Using most
of these often causes text to get jumbled up on top of itself, or hidden from
view. Style disabling (look in the "view" menu) is most effective, but causes
rather bland results, and sometimes results in content being squeezed into
tiny iframes, where access is all but impossible without switching the
styling back on.
One other defense was provided along with the power originally given to the
designers. CSS does allow user stylesheets to override author styles.
Unfortunately, this counter-power is quite unwieldy, and requires the
knowledge and skill of a site designer to use effectively. The reason for
this is the great excess most designers use that more often than not requires
the user sheet to match rule for rule each and every designer font rule in
order to counter the designers font rule.
A most elementary exercise of the counter-power for users is a simple
stylesheet containing only the following:
body {font-size: medium !important}
This simple rule is a great help on many sites, but can be counter-productive
on some sites, causing the adjustment to swell beyond that desired. On many
of those where the swelling does not happen, most or all fonts will come out
the size actually set in your browser's preferences, the size(s) presumably
best suited to your personal tastes and/or needs.
The simple rule can be extended somewhat, but with greater likelihood of
overcompensation, approximately as follows:
body, #body, #content, td, th, li, p, dd, dt {font-size: medium !important}
For Mozilla products, this rule must be placed in a plain text file called
userContent.css in the app profile's chrome directory. You may have to create
both the directory and the file.
You can see some more elaborate user styles I've used here:
http://fm.no-ip.com/css/share/