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Fonts

Font size is a major concern in the browser. Without designer intervention, the browser displays text as if it were running on a PC in a normal width and height display. This means that the fonts shown appear huge relative to the screen size. As a result, only seven lines of text can be viewed in the browser when no font sizing is applied. Additionally, only about 25 characters are viewable per line. From a practical point of view, this situation is not usable.

To make the browser usable, perform some form of font sizing to allow a reasonable amount of text to be viewed per screen. Ideally, put font sizing in a single external style sheet, and make all pages reference this style sheet. Do not set font sizes in document-level style sheets, or even worse, for in-line style sheets or <font> tags. Doing so makes it very difficult for the designer to update font changes, and runs the risk of failing to make a universal change. Use a single external style sheet to manage consistency in the pages.

Define fonts using a static external style sheet. You can also generate a style sheet dynamically using some form of server-side application, such as a CGI script or a Java servlet. Dynamic style sheet generation allows the server to decide, per user, what font size to use. This in turn allows the user to notify the server to change the font size. All HTML pages would have an external style sheet reference, another server-side executable. This executable dynamically generates font information based on the cookie, form component, or configuration value, relative to the IP Address of the telephone. Using a static external style sheet makes page development and testing much easier, since it appears the same way to both the designer and the reader. Allowing the user to choose a font size forces more work on the designer to verify that all fixed size items appear acceptably


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