[ZWeb] FYI: Font cleanup

[Paul Everitt]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, ethan mindlace fremen wrote:

> Paul Everitt wrote:
> > 
> > Ahh, I finally, finally got sick enough of the inconsistent fonts and
> > the huge PRE/CODE fonts that I made a quick fix.
> 
> I take it you didn't like the behavior of fonts under IE 5.x?

No, I did this from home under Linux with Netscape 4.x.  The thing I
described negatively affected everybody.

> > Now <LI> is the same
> > size as <PRE>, and <CODE> and <PRE> are both 10pt.
> 
> And you promptly broke it for nutscrape navelgazer users.  Specifying a
> fixed point size is essentially a Very Bad Thing (tm).  Relative point
> sizes are permissable.

No I didn't.  The fonts have been point sizes all along.  I didn't want to
make the overhaul to the correct approach that you described until we had
time to do it in a slow, non-intrusive.  Rather, I just wanted fonts on
the same page to be consistent with each other.

Be careful about those conclusion leaps.  It's been a Very Bad
Thing(tm) all along and that's what I'm hoping to (slowly) correct.

> I will look into assuring that fonts are defined consistently, but this
> means using relative sizes.

Correct.  The existing stylesheet, in use for over a year, unfortunately
disobeyed this.

The proposal I made allows us to tinker with a more sane stylesheet
without affecting everybody.  When we feel we have one that works with all
browsers, we can make it the official one.

> Note that IE as well as mozilla have a "Font Scale" facility in the
> menubar: this allows people who are, say, hard of seeing to increase the
> point size and those looking for 9pt or 10pt fonts can reduce their
> size.

Correct.  We should also throw out specifiying the font-family of Arial,
Verdana, then sans-serif.  At *most* we should just have sans-serif.

> > Now that I know 5,000 times more about CSS, I plan to fix it.  Here's
> > how.  I'll change 'standard_html_header' to:
> > 
> > if authenticated and the member has a property 'css_url':
> >   set the stylesheet link to point there
> > else:
> >   use the current stylesheet
> 
> This sounds fine.  Moreover, you can put a local_css file anywhere where
> you have special styles you want pages to display.

Martijn sent me some DTML snippets for standard_html_header.  I won't have
time to look at it till I get back.

--Paul