RE: font sizes for HTML help (was Re: Verdana 8 for HTML Help or WebH... )

["Higgins, Lisa" <LHiggins -at- carrieraccess -dot- com>]

Daniel Hall:

> You _cannot_ adjust the electronic presentation settings(font 
> size, images, etc.) to suit every member of your audience. 10 pt Garamond 
> may look fine to you on your 17" monitor at 1024x768, but what happens
when I 
> try to see the same thing on my 21" monitor running 1600x1200? That
picture 
> of your product may look stunning on your monitor running 32 bit color,
but 
> what happens when I see it at 256?

It's helpful to get a copy of the 256-color palette and use that to design
web graphics. 256 is still pretty many colors, so it hasn't cramped my style
too much as yet.

> This is espically true when working with HTML, as browser 
> settings override HTML tag attributes. 

Well, sort of. Settings are prioritized. If, for example, you set your font
size as 4pt; !important, that will override browser settings unless they are
also !important. (I may be off on the specific rules, but the general idea
is correct.)

The rank is something like user !important, author !important, user, author,
default.

The idea behind this is that you can tell the browser "This is a
design-intensive document, and I really really want you to show it the way
it was written," but the user can counter with, "I don't care about your
design-intensive document. I'm [legally blind|colorblind|irritable and
recalcitrant], and I need/want these characteristics, regardless of your
preferences."

> Of course, as I constantly rant, HTML is 
> not a language for creating page layouts. It's a markup language for 
> creating hypertext links. It has never (even at version 4+)been intended
for 
> that use. 

Cascading stylesheets were developed specifically to allow us to design
pretty webpages without sacrificing the integrity of the HTML structure and
content.

The challenge of HTML is that you can design beautiful documents, but you've
also got to deprecate them to work with different browsers, for different
users, different screen sizes, etc. So you'll generally have an optimized
version, but you need to ensure that that optimization doesn't make your
pages impossible to decipher when they're viewed differently. 


And I like the fact that people with severely impaired vision can still use
my documents. I think it's worth sacrificing precise design.

Lisa.