h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When viewing a web page im making in opera, the font sizes seem bigger than in IE. The web page is CSS reliant and the font sizes on the style sheet are set in points. Any reason why they look bigger and any way of getting round this? (and yes opera is viewing the page on 100%)


CK

What is your Text size set to on IE in the View menu?

Alji ,{Guru},(Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

smaller, but I thought one of the points of CSS is that font sizes (when set in points) looks the same on all browsers.

Unembelished font size code from my web page:



I have included the font size so that older browsers can see some text and understood that modern browsers used the class attribute to determine font size over the actual font size tag. Maybe opera uses the size over the class?


CK

You need to set the fonts in pixels, not points.

http://developer.apple.com/internet/fonts/

There's a great gallery there that illustrates the differences when using different methods of setting the fonts. They don't talk about Opera at all, but you can see the differences between versions of Netscape and IE on both Mac and Windows.

Also, you don't want to do that (assuming that your style sheet defines the class "3" as an equivalent font size).

You want to this instead:



since (presumably) if the browser is going to ignore the font tag in favor of the stylesheet, then you don't want to put the class in the tag that will be ignored! So put the class in the or in a or some other tag.

Thanks alot for the links. A browser only ignores the size and other font formatting if a class is present in the tag (i think) but i will put my css definitions in teh span tag now simply because will probably depreciate in the next version of html and browsers.


CK

It's already happened.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/graphics.html#edef-FONT

thanks. So the font tag is already depreciated but IE 6 still supports it (i think)?

The hr tag, now there's an annoying piece of code if you want it to look the same across all platforms which i only jsut figured out how to acheive


CK

Right, and will continue to support it for backwards-compatibility. If you want your pages to validate as HTML 4.01 or XHTML, you should not use it at all. I can't say that I've ever had trouble with , but then I don't use it all that much.

Ahg, try viewing it in opera and netscape (hr)!

So IE 7 will also support font meaning that the tag will not depreciate at all because browsers will always support it for backwards compatability when the truth of the matter is that people are still making sites without css using only the font tag and will ocntinue to do so because the browser will support it?

if you set your doctype! to strict it should ignore the font tag shoudlnt it?


CK

Speaking of DOCTYPE... It sounds like you're setting it but are you including a URL? To put IE into standards mode you have to include the URL associated with the HTML doctype in your DOCTYPE declaration.

The font tag is officially depreciated. If it stopped working tomorrow though, hundreds of thousands of webpages would break. It's a cycle where the developers don't care because the browsers don't care because the developers don't care. The only way to really break this cycle is to encourage developers to write standards compliant code so the browsers can eventually drop support for non standard stuff.

MS isn't going to alienate their developer audience for the sake of standards. As a matter of fact they've demonstrably worked to prevent interoperability. Embrace, extend, extinguish...

Netscape and Mozilla both still have quirks mode but I can't see that lasting for too many more versions - they aren't required to turn a profit to be sucessful so they have a bit more freedom than a commercial browser developer.

"So IE 7 will also support font meaning that the tag will not depreciate at all because browsers will always support it for backwards compatability when the truth of the matter is that people are still making sites without css using only the font tag and will ocntinue to do so because the browser will support it?"

Always is a very long time

Tools like dreamweaver, composer, frontpage and even MS Office are starting to use style sheets over tags, so by default the average designer will become more or less standards-compliant unless they go out of their way to hand code non-compliant pages or stick to antiquated software.

Eventually will be marked obsolete, at which point browsers may stop supporting it. Deprecated merely means you *shouldn't* use, not that you can't. It's a necessary transitional period, so old pages don't suddenly look bad, and so web developers can use both simultaneously to support a variety of browsers.

I don't know if it gets ignored in strict mode. I'll experiment someday

bring back gopher:// is wot i say