Bug 69654

[Mike Morgan]

Gervase Markham wrote:
>> I understood Gerv's opinion (and the following discussion) mostly as
>> supporting the approach where no font-size is defined for body text, but
>> where relative _header_ (and similar special-case) font sizes can be set
>> by % units.
> 
> 
> Yep. Of course, it remains to be seen how well this pure approach works 
> in the real world.

I think it would be best if CSS keywords were used in the place of %'s. 
  CSS keywords represent the old-school HTML FONT scale, and those are 
best whenever possible.  Remember FONT size="blah"?

Here is a good article on CSS2, font-sizes, and font-size keywords:
http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html

It's old, but it gets the point across.  The best part is that instead 
of using percentages, you can use words like "small" or "x-small" which 
make more sense conceptually.  Using keywords also avoids nesting 
problems for certain user agents.

Another alternative would be to use em's, but if you are going to use 
em's you might as well use the keywords to ensure proper size intervals 
(1.2x).

Overall, I agree with not defining a default font-size.  I am tired of 
sites that have 8-pt arial font just to make things look all 
post-modern.  Consider using keywords for instances where you do need to 
increase or decrease size.  :)

Another thing to consider is what level of accessibility you want to aim 
for.  A, AA, AAA?  This would be the time to worry about accessibility 
stuff.  This goes back to  the discussion about the footer being an 
accessibility problem.  If we put the navigation in a div, we could 
place it wherever we wanted dependent on what the stylesheet said.  :) 
A good site also has a navigation skip link so users using a text-only 
browser or screen reader can skip redundant links and hit the content 
right away.

Mike