newbie's 2 cents - why do we need "normalfont"?

[Longbow]

just became a customer, i spend couple of hours to do some translation work.

for a foriegn language, the <font> tag is extremely important, and most of the time, nasty - the size of the font must be set to correct values (say 14px, 12px, 10.5pt etc.) to gurantee good looking for Chinese characters. :(

i'm very happy to see that 3 categories of fonts, naming largefont, normalfont, smallfont, can implement a class.

but, what's the use of normalfont?

i mean, we can just redefine a <td> in the header, thus saved some space, bandwidth, and money.

say, in the header, between the style tags, add this
td {
FONT-FAMILY: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
FONT-SIZE: 14px;
}
.f1 {
FONT-FAMILY: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
FONT-SIZE: 14px;
}
.f2 {
FONT-FAMILY: verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
FONT-SIZE: 12px;
}

f1 is used to control the display of normal font, while f2 is used to control the display of small font.

we can see, the stuff inside the td tags are the same as the .f1 tags.

so, why do we need "normalfont" at all? the "td" will include anything in a table.

i considered to delete the <normalfont>, </normalfont> stuffs, but i've found out some <normalfont color="######">. well...

any suggestions? thanks!

[JamesUS]

They are included so that they work in non-CSS compliant browsers (ie NS 4 and IE 3). If you change it to classes (which I have done on one of my sites) then it won't work on those browsers.

[Longbow]

Originally posted by JamesUS
They are included so that they work in non-CSS compliant browsers (ie NS 4 and IE 3). If you change it to classes (which I have done on one of my sites) then it won't work on those browsers.

thanks for Ur post James, but i do believe CSS is the way we modify the look of pages, and only a very small fraction of people today are still using old version browsers.

[tubedogg]

NS4 + IE3 together still account for over 10% of the browsers. Not to mention AOL's internal browser, WebTV, and numerous other browsers.

[JamesUS]

If you want to change it you can, but you will be cutting off the site to older browsers, WebTV etc. I changed it to use "n", "s", and "l" classes on one of my forums and it works fine - it just isn't going to be distributed like that.

[Wayne Luke]

Hmmmm...

AOL 5 uses Internet Explorer 5.0 as its embedded browser... Upgrade Internet Explorer on your machine and AOL's embedded browser gets upgraded.

AOL 6 uses Internet Explorer 5.5. as will AOL 7.0. Again upgrade IE and AOL gets upgraded.

WebTV uses an embedded version of Pocket IE, the same browser that ships with Pocket Windows (formerly Windows CE).

These are not old outdated browsers. Even AOL 4.0 uses Internet Explorer which supported basic CSS back in its 3rd version. The only real problem with CSS is Netscape 4.XX which does have an appreciable market share and requires some work arounds to get working properly with any modern website especially considering it supports only HTML 3.2 properly.

I do believe the Dreamcast browser is a proprietary one or some sort of embedded linux browser. However Dreamcast is no longer on the market so those people will eventually have to upgrade with another device.

[Longbow]

Originally posted by wluke
The only real problem with CSS is Netscape 4.XX which does have an appreciable market share and requires some work arounds to get working properly with any modern website especially considering it supports only HTML 3.2 properly.


i agree.

i used to use Netscape a lot, back the days before windows 98 came out...

i once thought about implementing a script, get the browser version and use different css settings, but since Netscape people are less than 10% of my visitors, i lost the interest.

who thinks Netscape is actually dying?

[Ivan]

Netscape 6 supports everything you may want from browser. And it's so beautiful.

[Longbow]

but it ATE up more than 60 MB of my RAM, just after i started the browser!

[tubedogg]

That seems rather high. But keep in mind, it probably won't eat much more RAM as you go along - IIRC Netscape 6 grabs a big chunk at the beginning but use is very minimal beyond that.

[Kier]

Originally posted by Ivan
Netscape 6 supports everything you may want from browser. And it's so beautiful. NS6's CSS support is very good indeed - almost as good as that of IE6, but unfortunately its handling of animated GIF images and nested tables is absolutely terrible :(

[eva2000]

Originally posted by Kier
NS6's CSS support is very good indeed - almost as good as that of IE6, but unfortunately its handling of animated GIF images and nested tables is absolutely terrible :( dpesn't seem that bad :)

[Kier]

Originally posted by eva2000
dpesn't seem that bad :) you'll just have to take my word for it then. It is. Very.

[Wayne Luke]

I don't understand how Netscape 6.X can be so bad and unpredictable...

Every time I load it, I have to reboot my PC afterwards because I permanently loose about 15 megabytes of RAM and my swap file swells to 200 megabytes (it is 32 megabytes normally). I guess some beta testing would have fixed these problems but since the underlying engine still wasn't finished when they released it, I can understand why they skipped that step.

On the other hand Mozilla .92 works great on my machine with minimal problems. It's rendering is pretty poor though especially with tables. For this reason alone I don't consider it a viable browser for my mainstream usage.

I do use the IE 6 beta and it behaves better than either of the previous browsers.