Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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A Small Matter of Blog Page Text Size

Orcmid's Lair: Liking LiveWriter.  When I reported how Windows LiveWriter is working for me so far, I mentioned that I manually use <small> tags to shrink the current font size in a way that allows an user to change the text size and have it work properly.  I do that everywhere on web pages that I edit: Use <big> and <small> to vary sizes relative to the default size the browser is using.

Thanks to a comment from Mauricio, I find that I am mistaken about two things:

1. <small> doesn't seem to be getting it exactly right.  The text is even smaller than expected.  I hadn't thought too much about that because, for most of my applications of <small> on the blog, I like how small it is.  It is something to look into though.
     
2. The text doesn't resize anyhow.  None of the body text in my blog resizes when I use browser options to view text larger or smaller.  Other parts of the blog page do adjust, but the most-important part, the body of the article, doesn't change size at all.

All of my extra care to have the fonts adjustable is having no effect whatsoever.  I've been acting out of habit, consistent with the pages I author directly, and been oblivious to there being no useful effect.  And that seems to have been true from somewhere close to forever on this blog.

Somewhere, in my eagerness to take advantage of Blogger templates, with minimal customization, I have failed to learn enough about CSS and styles and the template itself to detect this situation.

By performing a "View | Source" on a simple post, I am able to see the problem.  The left sidebar and the body of pages are under a <div class="posts">. 

Back up in the template material that appears atop every every page, there are these little gems:

<style> <!-- full details suppressed for simplicity -->
   .blogtitle {font-size:32px;}
   .links  {font-size:11px;}
   .date   {font-size:16px;}
   .posts  {font-size:12px;}
   .byline {font-size:11px;}
</style>

It is not clear to me that I can liberate all of these rigidities so that readers of my blog can introduce their own text size preferences using browser options. 

I will experiment (gulp!), praying that I don't mess up the blog while making live template changes.  Oh wait, that's why I keep Spanner Wingnut around.  OK, this may not be too frightening after all.  Now, where are my code-monkey water wings ...

posted by orcmid at 6/09/2007 04:28:00 PM