Jacob writes...

> In reality, there should be two default font sizes, one for
> lines without line length control and one for lines with
> line length control. Since the user needs for font sizes
> are different in those two cases, for many users.

No, one shouldn't attack the symptoms; one should attack the problem.  I
rather think there should be controls (in the browser) for text rendering.
I should be able to specify the number of characters, pixels, or length
units to use for text wrapping, and that specification should be separate
from the window width.  *And*, notice that this doesn't affect any
standards; it's a browser setting.

I don't like web pages that change the default font size.  And regardless
of what you do with the font size, *don't* tell me what typeface to use!

> > In fact, these people are not designing "web" pages.  They are
> > designing "MSIE on Windows" pages.  The two are completely different
> > things.
>
> ?? I would guess almost all of these big sites have unix
> engines, not Windows engines.

What does that have to do with it?  Regardless of what the server is,
they're designing their web pages based on what client they expect them
to be displayed on.  And that means, for the vast majority of cases,
MSIE or Netscape on some Windows variant or other.

And I have to agree with Tony and Ned: I haven't seen anyone adjusting
their font size to control the character count on the lines.

Barry Leiba, Multimedia Messaging   ([log in to unmask])
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/leiba