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Copyright © 2003-2004 Ivo Timmermans. Unless otherwise specified, all material on this website (including any images, sound files, and other original works) may be distributed under a Creative Commons License. (more about this site)

Font sizes/site

Posted on 2004-01-03 by ivo :: /site :: link

Someone has been complaining that the fonts on this website are too big. This comment touches a subject that I've often enraged myself about: default font sizes in browsers.

For some reason or other, Microsoft ships Internet Explorer with a rather large default font size setting. People aren't exactly inclined to change anything, so most of the IE users will be using this default. This has inspired web designers all over the world to specify smaller fonts on their websites, to make it look acceptable in IE.

Mozilla ships with a default font size of 16 points, I always change that to 12 points to be able to read pages that don't specify anything in a comfortable font size. This does mean that I see websites that were designed for IE (which is a bad thing to do at any time) with very small, nearly illegible text.

I designed the layout of this website for my own browser, and it looks good (well, acceptable) in Internet Explorer, when you change the font to “Smallest”. I will not change the size of the fonts here, people should configure their browsers to display fonts in the size they like. If you keep the default of IE or Mozilla, you get what you asked for: large letters.