Bug 69654

Jouni Heikniemi jth at mikrobitti.fi
Tue Dec 9 05:58:21 UTC 2003



> Although I _do_ trust you, I've seen the difference between IE and
> Mozilla many times, and whether it's acceptable is just a matter of
> opinion.  My opinion is that the noticeable size difference (that mainly
> occurs for larger sizes, esp in IE) is minor and shouldn't be used as a
> reason to abandon using keywords for relative font-sizes or even worse
> fixed font-sizes.

I agree with both of you. Keywords are a good method for defining
font-sizes for certain types of pages. However, they aren't a particularly
good solution for pages that need considerable variance in font sizes.
While I'm not saying Bugzilla is exactly the most graphical of
applications, I wouldn't be ready to restrict such a heavy application to
the set of font combinations /properly/ definable through keywords.

We may not need all the font sizes, but some customizers may; and knowing
how badly units mix, choosing keywords at this point might make more rigid
font-tuning more of an issue for others.

Re what you say about inheritance issues with totally relative units, I
agree that's a problem, but it's not impossible to work around. It does
take a bit of design work to fight the issues, but the end result beats
the sole dependence on keywords IMO.

> disadvantages when it comes to usability, which is something you can't
> say for purely relative (nesting) or purely fixed (unscalable in IE)
> font-sizes.  And when it comes to usability versus cosmetics, it's an

Purely fixed font scalability may well change in a future version of IE
(or MSN Explorer, whatever). And that, my friends, will be a day we all
meet with horror.


Re accessibility levels that were brought up earlier: I think our focus
should be getting Bugzilla to work with CSS and allow customization. When
we want to move on to trimming our markup and make a dash for
accessibility, we need to reconsider some structural issues as well.
Anyway, even level A is a tall order with pages as complex as some in
Bugzilla...

Of course, when writing whatever CSS we're going to write, we should pay
attention to keeping our markup as good (semantic) as possible. That will
be an excellent basis for future work with accessibility.



Jouni



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