How can I get font-size to remain constant in Firefox?

[Neredbojias]

To further the education of mankind, Blinky the Shark

I used to know someone - a friend's father - who looked just like
Einstein. And he was a college prof, too, so I'm sure he enjoyed
that. (Or he wouldn't have done the look with the hair and moustache.)

I've always liked Albert because we have something in common.
- Stubbornness.

Is that your first shot at flying an X-Face? If so, congratulations.
They can't have any white space, and most of the time first-timers
manage to get a <CR> in them, which totally hashes them.

First try. There were a lot of "firsts" on this venture.

 

[Neredbojias]

To further the education of mankind, Blinky the Shark

That makes it easy to migrate the program to another system (or sync
it with another system), too. If you have set it up in the same
location (xnews folder has the same path) in each, you can just copy
that folder from one machine to the other. Hell, if your system
allows USB execution I think you can just carry it with you on a thumb
drive and run it from there wherever you are.

Uh huh. Microsoft hasn't done us many favors in the last ~15 years. (Of
course, they haven't done themselves many, either. OE, for example,
regressed from bad to worse.)

 

[Andy Dingley]

Due to a bug in IE. The user *should* be able to increase/decrease
font size as needed.

(For once) this isn't an IE bug. It isn't a requirement to be able to
scale a physical dimension (points, pixels, inches) because the
stylesheet already sets this. Of course the desktop needs some degree
of one-off configurability to match the physical size of the screen to
what an "inch" represents. Windows and IE happen to break this quite
badly for font-sizing, but that's a separate bug.

In practice though, legions of ignorant web developers mis-used this
feature so badly that Firefox has applied a hack on the basis of the
lesser of two evils. FF now allows scaling of font sizes, even when
specified in absolute units. This isn't incorrect (it's not forbidden
anywhere) but nor is it a recommended behaviour, according to a purist
readindg of the standards.

 

[Chaddy2222]

(For once) this isn't an IE bug. It isn't a requirement to be able to
scale a physical dimension (points, pixels, inches) because the
stylesheet already sets this. Of course the desktop needs some degree
of one-off configurability to match the physical size of the screen to
what an "inch" represents. Windows and IE happen to break this quite
badly for font-sizing, but that's a separate bug.

Just to add to this IE font re-sizeing issue.
By default, you can't re size specified fonts. But their are some
settings that you can change in the configuration which allow you to do
this.
Simply go to Tools and click on Internet Options, then choose the
accessibility option, just near the settings tab. Then check the box
that says, "ignore fonts specified on web pages". Then you can quite
happily change the font size.

In practice though, legions of ignorant web developers mis-used this
feature so badly that Firefox has applied a hack on the basis of the
lesser of two evils. FF now allows scaling of font sizes, even when
specified in absolute units. This isn't incorrect (it's not forbidden
anywhere) but nor is it a recommended behaviour, according to a purist
readindg of the standards.

Read my comments above regards MS IE.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

Aren't you the lucky one? Hardly any Windows systems are calibrated
to display "exactly" 16 points.

Due to a bug in IE.

It's hardly a "bug" that a browser conforms to the CSS specification.

In the sense that CSS is designed to be optional, it's certainly
permissible for a browser to ignore the author's sizing specification
(e.g when instructed by some user option) - indeed the web client
accessibility guidelines call for the provision of such an option; but
if the browser *does* implement the author's sizing specification,
then it cannot be a conforming browser unless it implements the
specification correctly. And an absolute size unit is an absolute size
unit: any other interpretation would be non-conforming.

So, in this sense the wretched MSIE is doing its best (modulo the lack
of dpi calibration) to be a conforming implementation; whereas
browsers such as Opera, and the gecko-based family, have decided to be
user-friendly *rather than* conforming.

If there's anything here that qualifies as a "bug", it's in the minds
of those crazy authors who specify absolute size units for a general
web display situation. Absolute size units are there for some good
reason - maybe printing, or some other specialised rendering
situation; but for making web pages for an unknown browsing situation,
they are totally unsuited. *As the CSS specification itself states
clearly to any author who cares to read it*.

The user *should* be able to increase/decrease font size as needed.

Can't agree - to be a conforming CSS implementation, the user *should*
be able to readily[1] *override* the author's size specification. I
mean: to disable it. To put it another way, the author stylesheet
specification should either be implemented correctly, or not at all.

Re-scaling the font size, when the author has specified it in absolute
units, qualifies as neither "correctly" nor "not at all", and, as
such, is non-conformant to the CSS specification. Anyone is entitled
to have their own opinions about the relative merits of being
user-friendly versus complying with the specification, but calling
specification-conformance a "bug" is surely going too far.

regards

[1] MSIE fails this test by hiding away the override option in a place
where few readers manage to find it, namely on a rather obscure
Accessibility menu. But, other than that, this is one of the few
aspects of MSIE's behaviour that I find myself defending.

 

[Stan McCann]

Aren't you the lucky one? Hardly any Windows systems are calibrated
to display "exactly" 16 points.


It's hardly a "bug" that a browser conforms to the CSS specification.

I stand corrected.

If there's anything here that qualifies as a "bug", it's in the minds
of those crazy authors who specify absolute size units for a general
web display situation.

Agreed, especially when that absolute size is ridiculously small.