Comments on: Strange Medium

By: sublimation blanks

sublimation blanks — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:41:52 +0000

Alistapart has a very good article on this…

By: Filter for 28/9 2006 - Felt

Filter for 28/9 2006 - Felt — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:48:19 +0000

[...] le.” Hey, isn’t that NRK 1? Flickr: the “ACK” factor Too familiar. Surfin’ Safari: Strange Medium Dave Hyatt on monospaced fonts in Safari. Mac Mojo: Messenger: haves and hA/Ve [...]

By: Pig Pen - Web Standards Compliant Web Design Blog » Blog Archive » font-family: monospace

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:59:22 +0000

[...] « Talking About XML With Tim Bray font-family: monospace font-family: monospace and why there are cross browser size issues. (via Roger) This entry [...]

By: timofonic

timofonic — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:21:58 +0000

Subtitute “If not” by “If yes”.

Sorry, I was tired…

By: timofonic

timofonic — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:23:39 +0000

This could be an interesting improvement in web browsers, I hope this can help solving one of my most annoying browsing problems:

I use very large resolutions (1280×1024 as minimun and 1600×1200 normally) and I’m tired of bad designed web pages that use very small fonts, so people using big resolutions can see nothing or very small fonts. I use firefox and tried to fix this using bigger fonts on the configuration ( Edit -> Preferences -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced and changing all the fonts size there) but every configuration I use that uses the desired font size it brokes most of the pages I visit in some form (text is bigger than most CSS stuff and sometimes even text not fitting in tables too). I can provide examples and the Firefox configurations I tried if needed.

Any manner of solving this? Does WebKit suffer this annoying problem? If not… any solution in the future about this problem?

By: macnoid

macnoid — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:28:15 +0000

The versions in the webkit nightlies are a nice approvement. Thanks!

This discussion, of course, raises the question about why a smaller monospace font is desired in the first place? I’ve heard speculation about trying to fit 80 characters on the width of small monitors or trying to compensate for unequal “boldness”. My guess is that this started because web page authors expected to get about the same content on a line with proportional and monospace fonts. Sacrifice vertical equality for the approximation of horizontal equality. With lead typesetting, the answer would be to use a compressed monospace font that had the same x-height as the proportional font. Within the environment Safari executes, that’s not an option because no such font is in common use.

This isn’t just a new problem with web browsers though. Proportional fonts coming into the monospace world of computers raised similar issues before. Artificial stretching is an ugly, but effective, way this was answered (on other platforms). Need to use that proportional dingbat of a pointing finger in a run of monospaced text? Algorithmically torture the Zapf Dingbat font horizontally to keep from messing up the nice columnar monospace layout. Want to put a Visual Basic command in a run of descriptive text? Vertically stretch or shrink the monospace characters to keep the vertical similarity. This technique is ugly, but cleaning up ugliness seems to be a strong motivating factor to get people to clean up their code.

Even though your techniques are just guesses, I find them to be good ones.

By: hyatt

hyatt — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:33:17 +0000

Nah that misnesting is just a mistake. The real markup is correct… I just screwed up the text.

By: mvonballmo

mvonballmo — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 18:50:02 +0000

Is the incorrect nesting of the “span” and “tt” tags in the penultimate example deliberate? If so, how does it relate to the effect caused? Interesting examination of seemingly random behaviors generated by a system with only a few parameters (the lesson here is to assign font sizes explicitly if you’re assuming relative sizes between font faces).

By: asbjornu

asbjornu — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:36:30 +0000

Interesting to read some facts about this issue, because I’ve been wondering about it myself.

PS: Is it possible to get a print stylesheet for these pages so it’s possible to print the articles neatly without having to disable the default stylesheet?