How can I stop XP 'Large Fonts' affecting web page?

[Stephen Poley]

Thanks for the feedback. I feel if it's good enough for the BBC to fix
their font size, it may be good enough for me.

It's rather the other way around. If ones content is sufficiently
important / well-known, one can more easily get away with inferior
layout.

In fact I've just tried out the BBC site in IE: it's a bit weird. The
index pages and side-bars seem to have fixed size text, but the main
article text and some other components are resizable.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

Contrary to widespread belief, it is possible to create well-designed,
structurally sound pages using FrontPage. It isn't even difficult. Most
people who use FrontPage don't use such options, but that's a different
issue.

Thanks, am now doing MS's very good 45 minute course on CSS within FrontPage

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Alan J. Flavell said the following on 5/28/2006 6:48 AM:

Plain text has that effect...

Congratulations, you've just produced yet another slight variation on
the HTML Straw Man Arguments, that have been refuted repeatedly over
the years. Do *try* to get up to speed before arguing, please.

Let me ask you this though, do you still support Netscape 4?

I've still got a copy installed, and I would fire it up if someone
complained about the results on an otherwise non-challenging page.
Haven't *needed* to do that for quite some time.

I hide my stylesheet from it, so it doesn't get a chance to mess up
the CSS. If I was "supporting" it, I could feed it a custom
stylesheet to improve its cosmetics, but I don't - its users still get
the content (text, images, and other media) as intended, i.e using its
default styling. Is that "support", or isn't it? You decide.

My demonstration page of "simple Ruby annotation", which is meant to
be a significant challenge to browsers, does exactly what it's
designed to do on non-capable browsers, which includes NN4. We call
that sort of thing "graceful fallback".

NN4's support for i18n forms submission is miserable, and I make no
effort to work-around its bugs in that regard. But if folks submit
us-ascii data, it'll be processed correctly, and that's all that the
formal specifications say you're entitled to rely on.

Does that answer your question?

Technology evolves and those who choose to stay in the dark ages
deserve to stay in the dark.

Graceful fallback is there for other reasons, but it does have the
useful consequence of appearing to support these older browsers, even
though it doesn't normally need extra work.

At least, NN4, shielded from CSS, will display all of my content in a
way that anyone can access it. IE6, if allowed to process CSS, is
quite likely to prevent the reader from accessing all of the content
(you'll know for example about the "peekaboo bug"?).

The same thing that topic has to do with Javascript and
comp.lang.javascript where I am reading it from.

So you had enough wit to complain about a cross-posted article, but
not enough to set narrowed followups? I guess that figures.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

[f'ups narrowed]

I feel if it's good enough for the BBC to fix
their font size, it may be good enough for me.

The BBC has rather an unfortunate history of web design.

As I remember their web pages in the early days, they were
inflexible, brittle, inaccessible.

Then they made a Big Thing of server-side accessibility features,
which would deliver a number of different variants based on the same
underlying content. Each variant was inflexible, but meant to be
usable by some particular subset of users. And the technique was
specific to their site(s).

This earned them some entirely unjustified bonus points in the
accessibility field, relative to sites that were offering a single,
flexible, design that adapted *itself*, calmly and quietly, reasonably
well to a range of client needs. A technique that can work, and work
in the *same* way, across the many web sites that a user will need to
deal with.

Remember, your readers spend most of their time on *other* web sites:
they don't want or need some viewing technique that works for your
site and only your site.

As time has progressed, however, and as the web has become (as it
seems to me) a more significant part of the BBC's overall media
dissemination strategy - rather than being a mere sideline of little
importance - they have been moving towards a more appropriate
flexibility of design.

It would be unwise to take your cue from one of their earlier
mistakes, rather than moving ahead of them as they move towards more
appropriate web design techniques.

Do you have any simple line I can add to the HTML to emulate the
fact that theirs doesn't change size (at least in IE6/7)?

I'm not sure that I exactly understand what you're asking for, but
whatever you manage to find, I have a user stylesheet waiting to
outvote you. But that doesn't excuse using authoring techniques which
a large proportion of users don't yet understand how to outvote.

Aim at flexible design - it works: work *with* it - stop hankering for
something that is badly supported, and only produces a good result
when it isn't working as you intend.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

I'm not sure that I exactly understand what you're asking for, but
whatever you manage to find, I have a user stylesheet waiting to
outvote you. But that doesn't excuse using authoring techniques which
a large proportion of users don't yet understand how to outvote.

Sorry, I'm CSS-challenged at the moment Can you explain what you mean by
'outvote' please?

And to clarify what I meant. Is there a small piece of code that I can add
as a temporary measure, that will mean any OS or browser font size settings
have no effect on my page?

Aim at flexible design - it works: work *with* it - stop hankering for
something that is badly supported, and only produces a good result
when it isn't working as you intend.

Sorry :-S

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Sorry, I'm CSS-challenged at the moment Can you explain what you
mean by 'outvote' please?

How about 'override'?

And to clarify what I meant. Is there a small piece of code that I
can add as a temporary measure, that will mean any OS or browser font
size settings have no effect on my page?

There is no code that you can write that will prevent visitors from
resizing your page. You may be successful thwarting the most clueless IE
users, if you work extra hard at it.

Methinks you need to adjust your mindset to realize you cannot 'force'
anything on the WWW.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

How about 'override'?


There is no code that you can write that will prevent visitors from
resizing your page. You may be successful thwarting the most clueless IE
users, if you work extra hard at it.

Methinks you need to adjust your mindset to realize you cannot 'force'
anything on the WWW.

As I said, it is just a temporary measure so the page doesn't screw up for
those with large fonts. The BBC seemed to manage it, so I just wanted to
add to my page whatever they added to theirs. Seems simple in theory, but
you guys have the know-how that I don't as yet to actually help me implement
it... as a temporary measure.

Thanks to anyone able to

 

[petermichaux]

CSS

Hi Chris,

I haven't read all of this thread but if you are interested in learning
about CSS I recommend you read CSS: The Definitive Guide by Meyer from
O'Reilly. For specific examples or tutorial type books see Bullet Proof
Web Design by Dan Cedarholm. It is a really great book and easy to
read. For inspiration, CSS Zen Garden is a great book and website too
(http://www.csszengarden.com/). One of the design examples is fully
elastic and would be great for visually impared. The mailing list you
can join at http://css-discuss.org/ is the best place for help with
CSS.

Peter

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

As I said, it is just a temporary measure so the page doesn't screw up for
those with large fonts. The BBC seemed to manage it, so I just wanted to
add to my page whatever they added to theirs. Seems simple in theory, but
you guys have the know-how that I don't as yet to actually help me implement
it... as a temporary measure.

Thanks to anyone able to

Make the whole page an image, else the simple answer is *no*

 

[John G Harris]

Who still supports outdated antiquated software other than IE6?

So some of your customers can't read your Terms and Conditions. Have you
discussed this with your lawyer ?

John

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Thanks, am now doing MS's very good 45 minute course on CSS within FrontPage

I don't know "MS's very good...course on CSS", but you just might want
to consider getting off the MS tit, Chris. There are other sources of
information (not to mention software) out there. FP and Word are the
laughing stocks of the "HTML editor" world. Probably not the best place
to try to learn good habits.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

Looking at that page, I don't see anything that should be a table.
They do have a lot of *lists* though.

The rounded boxes scale badly because the images define the width.
You can do that with CSS and a lot of nested divs, also so that it
scales:
<URL:http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/corners.html>

Thanks - I like the way that's done. Will hope to get round to it when I
have some more time.

The two-column design in the lower box is a classic CSS "problem".
Just google for "CSS" and "columns" and you'll find lots and lots.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

Hi Chris,

I haven't read all of this thread but if you are interested in learning
about CSS I recommend you read CSS: The Definitive Guide by Meyer from
O'Reilly. For specific examples or tutorial type books see Bullet Proof
Web Design by Dan Cedarholm. It is a really great book and easy to
read. For inspiration, CSS Zen Garden is a great book and website too
(http://www.csszengarden.com/). One of the design examples is fully
elastic and would be great for visually impared. The mailing list you
can join at http://css-discuss.org/ is the best place for help with
CSS.

Peter

Thanks Peter, that's very helpful.

I wonder, do you know of any converters either available now or in
development, that will take current HTML code, and convert (find & replace
basically) the appropriate tags, for CSS placed in the header?

It can't be that hard to do, and I'd be surprised if someone hadn't had a
crack at it. Would really help those of us with sites ready designed.

 

[Richard Cornford]

Lasse Reichstein Nielsen wrote:

Thanks for the feedback.

There is little point posting thanks on alt.html to a c.l.js regular who
does not appear to have posted to alt.html in at least the last three
month. He may never see your thanks.

You should do as Jukka did; posting to all the cross-posted groups,
setting the follow-ups to exclude the irrelevant c.l.js and stating that
you had done so in the message with the altered follow-ups (so anyone
interested would know where to look for responses).

Richard.

 

[Toby Inkster]

It can't be that hard to do, and I'd be surprised if someone hadn't had a
crack at it.

Using presentation HTML (e.g. FONT elements, table-based layout) and using
semantic HTML plus CSS are two totally different processes.

A semantically marked up document has more information in it than a
presentationally marked up document. For example:

<h1>Foo</h1>

tells us that "Foo" is a heading for the content below it. "Foo" will
probably continue to be the general topic of all other text until another
H1 element is encountered. Any H2, H3, etc elements further down the page
are probably sub-topics of "Foo".

On the other hand:

<font size=6><b>Foo</b></font><br><br>

tells us far less. It just says that the author wanted the browser to
display "Foo" in some big, bold text; but with no explanation of why this
was desired.

So going from semantic HTML to presentational HTML means that you're
losing information. Conversely, to go from presentational HTML to semantic
HTML means you have to add in some information -- e.g. specify in the
document which parts are headings, which parts are paragraphs, etc. Adding
in that information requires human input; which might be why there are no
tools that can simply transform presentation markup to semantic markup.

Going the other way -- converting semantic markup with CSS into
presentational markup -- might be possible to automate with some tool like
what you describe, but it's not clear why anyone would want to do so.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

In fact I've just tried out the BBC site in IE: it's a bit weird.
The index pages and side-bars seem to have fixed size text, but the
main article text and some other components are resizable.

Could you be more specific about where you saw that? When I look at
www.bbc.co.uk, the texts, where they are sized at all, seem to be
sized in em units, which is good, and IE seems happy to re-size them
at my choice. My complaint would be that it's refusing to fit in the
window width that I gave it, and forcing a left/right scroll bar,
without any evident content-related need to.

On the other hand news.bbc.co.uk seems to do all(?) of its text sizing
in px units, with the expected negative consequences in IE. Of course
that too refuses to fit in my chosen window width...

Neither of them seem capable of making up their mind whether they are
HTML/4.01 or XHTML/1.0 Appendix C, which at least partly accounts for
their many syntax errors. It's kind of pathetic that they have a load
of kinky browser-specific adjustments in their stylesheet, including
the notorious "Tantek hack", and yet they seem incapable of producing
elementary HTML with halfways accurate syntax. But I digress.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

[f'ups narrowed]

I wonder, do you know of any converters either available now or in
development, that will take current HTML code, and convert (find &
replace basically) the appropriate tags, for CSS placed in the
header?

That doesn't really make much sense. Browser support for HTML/3.2-ish
stuff isn't going to go away any time soon, so if you've got a
quantity of that legacy stuff you might as well leave it that way. At
least until you're ready to radically rebuild it.

Properly-engineered HTML "Strict", marked up for its logical content
(such markup will mostly be missing from presentationally-composed
HTML/3.2) really should be built from the ground up. Trying to hack
existing presentational stuff into some kind of "equivalent" with CSS
isn't going to produce an improved product, really.

As spotted in another place recently:

|| Momentan leidet Dein Code arg an Divitis und verkapptem
|| Präsentationalismus...

(approx) "Currently your code is suffering seriously from divitis
and disguised presentationalism".

And that would be what you'd get, from any automated conversion.

It needs additional information input to supply the logical structure,
and get substantial benefit out of the separation.

It can't be that hard to do,

On the contrary: I'd be inclined to compare it with trying to turn
cheese into fresh whipped cream. Both of them are milk products, it's
true: but if you want whipped cream then I'd suggest using fresh
starting materials, not trying to start from another end-product.
That's not so far from what you'd be trying in the attempt to turn
presentational HTML/3.2 into logical "strict" HTML with CSS
presentation(s).

 

[dorayme]

Using presentation HTML (e.g. FONT elements, table-based layout) and using
semantic HTML plus CSS are two totally different processes.
.....

to go from presentational HTML to semantic
HTML means you have to add in some information -- e.g. specify in the
document which parts are headings, which parts are paragraphs, etc. Adding
in that information requires human input; which might be why there are no
tools that can simply transform presentation markup to semantic markup.

Yes, well said, Toby. Consider what looks like a problem of
lesser magnitude, for machines to make pictures bigger and be of
equally good quality when you don't have the rich informational
base of a negative. It is well known to be quite hard to enlarge
a digital pic well beyond it's natural size through simple
algorithms. Reducing them in size is quite a different problem
and quite tractable.

 

[Neredbojias]

Thanks for the feedback. I feel if it's good enough for the BBC to
fix their font size, it may be good enough for me. Do you have any
simple line I can add to the HTML to emulate the fact that theirs
doesn't change size (at least in IE6/7)?

Actually, in the link you listed that I visited, the font size _did_
change, and the page didn't look too page in the doing. What specific
page-url are you referring to?

In any event, it's impossible to stop font-resizing in most browsers.
Opera (et al) even resizes images. And with IE's dwindling market-share,
other browsers are a force to be considered.

 

[Chris Tomlinson]

Looking at that page, I don't see anything that should be a table.
They do have a lot of *lists* though.

The rounded boxes scale badly because the images define the width.
You can do that with CSS and a lot of nested divs, also so that it
scales:
<URL:http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/corners.html>

Thanks - I like the way that's done. Will hope to get round to it when I
have some more time.

The two-column design in the lower box is a classic CSS "problem".
Just google for "CSS" and "columns" and you'll find lots and lots.

Thanks for the feedback.