Quarter Life Crisis

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Changes¶

449 words

Prompted by previous discussions on the topic of resolution and making things scale well, I switched to experimental mode and tried to eliminate all px units in favour of em and % from my CSS, in order to allow the person looking at the site to determine the size of all of the contents by their default font size.

It turned out that wasn't too hard and only took a bit of guessing and checking everything still looks right. Thus, from now on, whatever your font size is, the site will scale with it as gracefully as possible. This only assumes that your window is reasonably wide for the font size you choose if you want to avoid having horizontal scrollbars. Try it out using your browser's Increase/Decrease font size commands.

Also, this was a good excuse to put the guts of the new Safari beta through its paces after having mostly looked at its surface earlier.

Not everything worked as I think it should, though. I'm not sure where the problem lies in each case:

• The navigation sections ceased appearing anywhere reasonable and looking the way they should in IE 5/Mac. I don't understand why. But it may just be too late now. Does anybody care?
• Talking about IE – how well do Windows browsers deal with the changes?
• To achieve the sizing of everything, I had to specify the size of the logo at the top left relative to the font size. This causes the image to look slightly blurred in Safari – a feature I noticed before. Two things here: First, I guess it's good intentions, doing some anti-aliasing. Second, Safari is quite bad at it: Compare the pixelish looks of the shrunk image in the recent post on UnicodeChecker in Safari to the smooth presentation in Camino.
• At very large font sizes, the next thing becomes apparent: In Safari, the lines with the dates on them don't have sufficient line spacing. As I don't specify any line spacing for the elements in question – at least I'm not aware of it – I'd expect the spacing to be fine by itself. It is in Camino.
• Very odd: Now that I started playing with it, I observed Safari using Zapfino for the µ sign at the beginning of posts for the first time. But it only does so rarely, say here. Any explanations for that? Is my markup dodgy? All posts are generated by the same template anyway. Odd.
• I didn't dare applying the em units to the (sqaure) images in the pages yet as many of them aren't supposed to be scaled and might end up looking worse. Also, they're mostly decorational.

April 15, 2003, 2:17

Tagged as zapfino.