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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Oh, and another apology, for the fact that the GetWX Perl script misses posts.

I have no idea why it does this, and of course I can't do anything about it from here, but I'd really like some details on how it happens.

Here are some assumptions:

1. that it happens intermittently
2. that it happens intermittently because of the random insertion of ads at the bottom, or the top, of a WX page
3. that because of this, it wouldn't be possible to track down by "following" the progress of the virtual Perl browser with a regular browser, because they'd be "seeing" different ads"
4. It would be possible to track down if we saved each page in its entirety, prior to the regular-expression cleanups of them and their appending to the main file (this is trivial, anyone who knows Perl could do that)
5. Following the above, the problem is that a regular expression, when the "wrong" ad is displayed, deletes a bigger chunk of that page than it was intended to do, because of something in the ad

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t happy note the use of a,b,c-style ordered list -- thanks Jon! t /happy

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There's no need to apologize, John. WX did something unexpected with the random ads. One thought I had was that we could use WX's "Get all posts" URL to download the thread in much larger chunks (200-300 posts at a time), which would be more efficient, take less time, and probably simplify cleaning things up.

You know you don't really have to worry about any of this til you get back, right? Have fun!

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I believe that DX and John H. are correct. I've been testing a stylesheet with no font sizes in the P tag (and a couple of other related tags) and I think it will work with minimum side effects. I'll post something in Press and then upload the new stylesheet. If there are valid complaints by the late-night users, I can flip it back in the morning (i.e. in about 7 hours).

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