I'm on AOL and a green iMac-- looks fine.

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Mozilla on the PC is fine, but in Netscape 4.78, there's no size change.

Testing

edit: Nope, no joy in Netscape

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OK, I've got Netscape 4.79 on my home PC, and it's also not doing the small font thing. Lemme try one more thing:

Am I small?

Nope. Definitely a Netscape 4.X bug.

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Nope. Definitely a Netscape 4.X bug.

Yeah, but it works on Netscape over at WX.

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Wow, you're right! I looked at the page source for posts on both systems and neither one is altering the font tag. I wonder if it's another browser-won't-override-the-stylesheet issue?

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Could be. There's also that thing with the font and pre tags in Netscape that I experimented with last week:

DXMachina "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Oct 11, 2002 8:58:01 pm EDT

This place (and LiveJournal) pretty much forced me to move from Netscape to Mozilla. Too many gotchas. OTOH, I have all sorts of problems using Mozilla with the Microsoft Knowledge Base. You can't frelling win.

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FWIW, all of those have looked small in Opera. (er, all that were supposed to. the rest looked normal-sized)

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It's a stylesheet issue. Simply having

p  {  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px; font-style: normal}

in the stylesheet, or just in a t style tag in the page header, is preventing the font size tag from working. Actually, it's the font-size parameter specifically that's causing the problem.

And it's not the same px vs. pt issue that was brought up earlier. I tried using pt instead of px and the Netscape 4.x bug remained.

I don't know what we can do.

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Instead of using a point or pixel size for message text, can you just leave the size parameter out of the style sheet (edit:) for the message text? Then the browser default size would be in effect, and there would be nothing to override a user changing the font size, right? It would only be necessary for the message text.

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I have made the fatal mistake of logging in to have a quick read of Building A Better Board, and seeing some stuff that I posted about a while ago discussed at length.

I really can't read the whole thread at the glacial speed of the average Vietnamese internet café, but here's my position on the font-size thing.

The best compromise is not to set any font size in the line that Jon quotes above:

p { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal}

Correct me if I'm wrong, Jon, but the only place that a P tag applies, (and a P tag alone, not one more specifically styled with a class) is the actual bodies of our posts themselves, i.e. not the poster name, not the tagline, not the nav on the left or anything else -- the post itself is the only part of the page governed solely by the P declaration?

So I believe the size should be removed from the P declaration, and if it's needed elsewhere, in a part of the page which inherits from that P declaration, then a specific size should be added to that inheriting declaration.

That would allow users, no matter what browser they're using to adjust size of the post font with menus/keyboard etc (I agree that IE on PC is inherently at fault for not allowing this) and it would also allow people on Netscape to see big/small fonts coded with the font tag.

If a size is determined to be necessary, it shouldn't be in points or in pixels, it should be in percentages, something like 80% or 90% is where I'd start myself, because it's axiomatic that "body text" -- something you settle down to read many lines of -- should be set smaller than other informational text like nav or titles or poster names.

Anyway, sorry if I've got in the middle of a discussion I haven't read the whole of, or gone over old ground or whatever, but, as I'm sure you all know, this stuff really matters to me!

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