Cellpadding et al

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> writing in
news:GwE1m.17970$vi5.12869 (AT) uutiset (DOT) elisa.fi:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs
writing in news:slrnh4d0l5.5rr.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld:
[...]
You don't always want things like borders and padding to scale with
the font. People who bump the font up to read the text aren't
reading the borders and padding, and making them grow just means
even less room for the text.

I agree with you about borders,

I don't. If font size is increased, keeping border width the same, you
will sooner or later end up with something rather ridiculous: boxed
text with box border that looks thin and fragile.

but I think I would want padding to
shrink/grow as well.

For similar reasons, yes. This becomes more obvious if you consider
text with ascenders, descenders, and diacritic marks. While a padding
of 1px or 2px might be sufficient when text is in small size, it's
disproportionate for large text sizes. Even if, say, the acute accent
of "É" does not touch the top border when there is a 1px top padding,
it very much looks like it does when the font size is very large.

Demo page: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/test/pxem.html

Agreed. Although there isn't much difference for borders:
[http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info/usenet/pixelem.html] (updated with
images)

I was surprised that IE8 _still_ does not resize font sizes in
pixels. I would have thought that would be something they would have
fixed (who knows, maybe Microsoft doesn't think that _needs_ to be
fixed).

If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

When font size is specified in pixels, it shall be implemented in
pixels. The CSS specifications are clear on this. It's OK to let users
override author stylesheets in different ways, but taking a font size
declaration in an author stylesheet and "interpreting" it as meaning
something completely different is just wrong.

Agreed, however, IE8 still does not let the user up the font size when
it's expressed in pixels. I'm talking about View->Font-Size not View->
Zoom, which increases everything.

I could see a situation where one could see an image clearly, but not
the text. No need to increase _everything_, just the font.

Opera zooms everything.
Chrome zooms text, but not images.
Firefox zooms text only, if that's selected (I like that).
Safari 3 zooms only text, Safari 4 zooms both/either.
K-Meleon zooms either and/or both.

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

[...] IE8 still does not let the user up the font size when
it's expressed in pixels. I'm talking about View->Font-Size not
View-> Zoom, which increases everything.

What I meant is that browsers should _not_ do such things. It means that
they take the page's CSS code and scale the values in it. Even if done on
user command, it is grossly illogical. If a style sheet says font-size: 9px,
it is technically correct to use that font size _or_ to let a user
completely override that declaration, by whatever font size setting the user
wants. But it is illogical to apply a font size that is some pixels larger
than the declared size or some percentage larger.

Firefox, for one, is rather clueless in letting the user do Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-
to increase or decrease font sizes without saying what that means and
without giving the user any finer control. (Minimum font size is a better
idea.)

I could see a situation where one could see an image clearly, but not
the text. No need to increase _everything_, just the font.

That's of course rather common. But as a cure, setting a minimum font size,
or simply ignoring all font size settings in page style sheet, is a better
approach. After all, the user can be expected to decide on a minimum font
size, so why bother playing with attempts at enlargening font size from the
author-specified size, on a per-page basis, possibly without realizing that
different elements have different font size settings?

Using a font size other than the one declared in author style sheet is
always risky, as it may cause distorted layout or e.g. poor line height (if
the author has declared line height in pixels, for example). But I don't
think these risks are any smaller if the change is made by using the
author-specified size plus or minus some size or as multiplied by some
factor.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

I have to say that everytime I post a question on here my knowledge
grows in leaps & bounds... much better than reading some jargonised manual!

--
TTFN
Jim

The tough part about being an officer is that the troops don't
know what they want, but they know for certain what they
DON'T want.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #47