Default font size in gnome

[Felix Miata]

On 2009/02/28 15:08 (GMT-0600) Chris Cheney composed:

> Agreed that px should go away entirely in HTML.... 
> ... an abomination that it
> was ever allowed into the HTML specification at all....

WRT fonts at least, HTML never had px. All HTML had and has for font sizing
is em, though it isn't called em (<font size=[1-7]>, where 3=1em). If you're
referring to use of px to style web page fonts, it's CSS that px should, but
won't for the foreseeable future, go away from.

> I'm not sure the last time general DPI has been 72 DPI,

Never happened on Windows. On Mac it changed from 72 to 96 at or before OS X.

> at least on
> Windows computers (or Macs afaik) for at least the past decade they have
> been kept their DPI settting set to 96 DPI.

Windows default DPI has been 96 as far back at least as Windows 95.
http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2005/11/08/490490.aspx explains its
history. Many higher DPI laptops are coming pre-configured by the vendor to
120 instead. If they weren't doing that, too much would be too small for too
many people, which would negatively impact sales.

> The last time a monitor was
> 72 DPI was probably when 15" CRT (13.8" viewable) were commonly at
> 800x600 resolution. My computer from 15 years ago was even higher than
> that running at 1024x768 on a 15" CRT (93 DPI).

CRTs are analog, so it's dot pitch and supported resolution that determine
ultimately what the resulting DPI is. To make things big, some people still
set 800x600 on 16" viewable, which is 62.5. Even 1024x768 on 16" viewable is
only 80, on 18" only 71. OTOH, 1600x1200 on 18" viewable, available 10 years
ago, is about 111. 1920x1440 on 21" viewable, about that old as well, is
about 114.

> The main issue here is that operating systems are broken so a Web
> designer can't use a point based font and expect it to look the same
> everywhere, which it should. So sometimes they end up using pixel based
> sizes because of that reason, and in some cases they use pixel based
> sizes just from not knowing any better.

Even if all existing systems had accurate DPI, web designers would still have
no more business using pt for sizing web page text than they do px. They
should only be using em to size text, with the option to size other things in
%, leaving it up to each user to determine the appropriate size of his em.
Both px and pt totally disregard a user's determination of appropriate em size.

A web designer setting fonts in px or em is little different from Ubuntu
locking everyone's desktop font size to an arbitrary, non-adjustable size.
It's your puter, your job to pick the size that's best for you. It's the web
designers' job to respect whatever that choice happens to be. When they
don't, it's the epitome of rude, regardless how broadly that behavior
dominates the web today.
-- 
"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your
mouths, but only what is helpful for building
others up."			Ephesians 4:29 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/