As long as it's changeable, I don't care. :) Overall, I prefer 14 point, as it's closer to the system font. And after all, people complained when the system font moved from 12 point up to 13 point, etc. I'd stick with 14 and let the user change it if need be.

Thanks again for all the work, Dave!

I personally don't understand why anyone would want 16 over 14 as most sites define 12 and even 10. I think issues with pop-up windows opening at wrong sizes should take precedent. Then I can finally use Safari as my only browser.

How about making the font + / - buttons a standard addition on the toolbar either way? Because font sizes vary so widely, it's a function I find myself using all the time - and I can't imagine that most people don't have the same problem. As for 14 v 16pt, with constantly increasing screen resolutions, I vote for 16pt - with the options to change it always visible.

...and speaking of options, how about one to remember my spell check on / off preference ;-)

16 point is too big, imho... it makes normally readable text too "bold-looking" and harder to read comfortably. on the other end of the scale, 10 point (and some 12 point) type loses its readability when it's light on a dark background. 14 point is a good compromise.

as for a completely separate issue, i take issue with Mac OS's long-standing history of making 12-point text on screen mean a certain size, pixelwise, rather than taking into account the resolution of the display and making 12-point text bigger or smaller depending on whether the user's monitor is a 72dpi monitor or a 96dpi monitor, etc.

i hope that with the wonderful text rendering support built into Quartz, this anachronism will be done away with. i would hope i'm not in the minority here.

Gotta concur on this - I think 16 pt. is way too large (in fact, I think 14 pt. is too, but I'm not going to press my luck).

<...insert obligatory complaint about command-w closing tabs here...>

:>

Isn't 16pt the standard on WinIE? Stick with 16pt as the default and give us web designers one less headache.

14 is a better default base font size. As Joshua stated, it's closer to the normal system font. Additionally, it's also closer to the default document font (Helvetica 12). 16 would just seem out of place.

I like 14, I think it's reasonable to make it a preference but 16 would be way too large. Font +/- buttons could be an optional toolbar element, but I think making it a default would be against the simplicity goals of Safari.

Remember, we can all add CSS rules for making default text on our sites whatever point size we want... which will match across browsers and across platforms.

This is really only relevant to sites that don't take advantage of CSS, no? If that's the case, then the "designer" probably didn't care what size the text showed up as, and it should be displayed in a manner that is comfortable for the user to read and scan. In this case, I believe 14pt is better on the Mac. 16pt is too big for comfy reading.

"...CSS rules for making default text on our sites whatever point size we want..."

Ack. Gack! Ick!

You should use percentages or factors of the base font size for the font size on your page (1.0em for important content, maybe 0.8em for sidebars, et cetera). Not point sizes. Using pt sizes can be (and often is) a usability problem. You should honor the user's choice of a base font point size and base your font sizes on that, and not decide what you think is good for your visitor.

Remember that even though text can be a visual design element, its main purpose is to communicate thoughts and information. That means the impressiveness of the overall design and layout is secondary to readability.

make it work like IE. mac users have to deal with enough incompatibilities without seeing web pages with text breaking all over the place when it's not supposed to. also, it'll discourage web designers from making hacky javascripts or css to deliver styles specifically for safari, thereby increasing the likelyhood that they'll code to standards.

I have only a 15" TFT iMac with 1024x768, I use 12 pt. 14 is a good compromise between my "standard" and 16, the big screens "standard".

I often find that, when having a dpi of something around 110, 14pt text is somewhat on the smallish side. Personally, I'm slightly near-sighted, which means I don't have any problems reading small text on the computer. For people who are older, on the other hand, small text can be very hard to view, since the eyes get far-sighted when one grows old.

Besides, when reading large amounts of text, such as books, it irritates the eye to read small text, even though it looks better layout-wise.

The main argument, and that's one that _should_ be taken seriously: The majority of browsers specify 12pt (16px) serif fonts.

When authors (sensibly enough) want to specify sans-serif fonts in their documents, particularily Arial and Verdana, for most uses they are too big, and to many, quite unreadable at 12pt.

Many authors will then opt to use em's or % to size fonts, typically in the range 0.7 - 0.8em, something that would typically still be readable to most users - _when the base font size is 16px_. With a base font-size of 14px, 0.7em becomes ~7.35 pixels, something that is unreadable to everybody but the "I'm-a-webdesigner-that-easily-can-read-4px-fonts"-types.

And so; if webdesigners find that relative font-sizes may end up totally illegible in browsers, they aren't going to use them.

So: Whether 16px serif fonts may not be the _prettiest_ default, it's the default webdesigners will need to be able to *rely on* if they are going to specify fonts in relative units.

In favor of 16:

at least it would be standard across most browsers (as I understand it). Then you could leave it to most designers to hard code whatever sizes they want to use in particular situations.

Unless I'm mistaken and 16 is not "standard", in which case it's a free market and my two cents is on the more aesthetic 14pt.

Heck, I'm not too much into typography, but I already went from 14pt to 13pt in my preferences, because 14 seemed too big to me. I do have to wear glasses, but 16 is way out of line for me - unless I would switch to 1280x960 on my humble 17" display; which I won't do because everything else is so tiny then.

I totally agree that 16 looks awful. But it seems to me like it really would be best to emulate IE/Win on these things. It will save designers who care headaches and save users from designers that don't.

I like 16, because it's the standard that IE uses (well, however you'd like to call it....96dpi instead of 72 dpi). The reason is that many many web pages are designed to be at 96 dpi. We used to have this problem with Netscape 4 for Mac (not sure about older versions of IE). I don't understand why people say that "most sites define their own sizes," because that's really an opinionated statement, and it depends on which sites you visit.

I say use IE's behavior as the default so most people will see webpages as though they were using IE. Remember, when this is final, you are potentially going to have a lot of novice users who aren't going to understand why their site looks so small in Safari as compared to their Windows PC. The last thing we need is to go all the way back to the 72 vs 96 dpi problem again. We're lucky enough for that to be past us, so I say let it stay behind us. If someone wants to customize it because it's too big, let them do that. But the default behavior should be as similar to IE as possible. No matter what the anti-Microsoft protestors say.

Sure, CSS is powerful, but not everyone uses it on their sites. Even some well designed sites with fancy layouts and graphics don't use CSS, and those kinds of sites could potentially look funny when it's not at 96 dpi. We were having this issue back before IE 5 for Mac came out; let's not let it happen again.

(Seems like another silly topic...let's hope this doesn't turn into another command-w vs. shift-command-w! :)

Big reason for 16: Apple makes higher-resolution screens and we buy them.

Fully agree with the font + and - buttons as default; this will fix people's problems regardless of what the Safari team chooses.

I'm all in favor of 16 point font. I have a 17" Studio Display (1280x1024) and I use 18 point font. I think that 16 point is a good comprimise between the smaller, lower resolution displays and the bigger, insane resolution displays (like the 20" and 23"). What really matters though is that we can change it (which we have), so people can choose what they like.

My default font is set to Times Roman 16, with Monaco 13 as the monospaced font. I prefer the larger text, but this may be a function of age and display dpi pitch.

I also have used Safari Enhancer to set the minimum font size to 13. This has been an important ability for me - I find that many sites set their text to unreadably small sizes. Please make the minimum font size a mainline preference feature.

Easy Answer:
I prefer 16. I prefer 1600x1200 for screen real estate but some sites use very small text that becomes unreadable. I keep the Size buttons on my toolbar, but would also be happy with an Opera like text-and-image magnifier

More detailed answer, but perhaps not as useful:
I really don't care, but I think you're asking the wrong question. I want to be able to read text easily in a window and I don't give a flying rat what the size numbers are or where the text breaks. I'd like a way to ignore as meaningless font size choices made by someone who never tested their page on a an 800x600 iBook or a 1600x1200 19" Sony monitor.

I'd like three sliders, one for text size, one for graphics size and a master control that moved the first two in sync. I want presets so that I can see how my page will look in IE Win and if my current design will fit in 737 pixels across without a scrollbar. You have Quartz to work with, you can transcend the deficiencies in all other browsers.

This has been done so badly and so incompatibly for so long and the current direction seems to be to throw more of the same old solution at it. Throw out the old box.

16 points is way too big. 14 is too big as well. Doesn't anyone care about information density anymore?

12 point Geneva has been the traditional default font for Mac applications since the very first days of the Mac; that would be a good choice. The Mac's traditional hand-tuned bitmaps (Geneva, Monaco, and a select few others) are very readable even down to 9 points, because designer Susan Kare quite simply kicks much ass. I honestly think Safari should default to 9 point Geneva, and use the hand-tuned bitmaps without anti-aliasing.

As long as it's changeable, the default doesn't matter. Perhaps when Web designers give up this idea that the Web is a piece of paper that is -or should be- absolutely identical to every viewer, this whole debate will be moot.

Here's a tip for designers: Set a base font size in pixels, say -for example- 16px, on the body or HTML tag. Define all your other font sizes in terms of that base: someone here suggested 100% for body text, maybe 80% for sidebars.

Why do it this way? Because the usability issue when defining font sizes in pixels comes from the fact that IE/Windows doesn't let you resize fonts set in pixels. By hiding this "base font" rule from IE (which is incredibly simple), you can thus have a 16-px-font page that's resizable in everything except for IE/Win, and then have IE/Win use the default font size (which is usually 16px, and if the user changes that there's not much you can do), so it stays resizable too. The best of all possible worlds.

Now, how to hide the font rule from IE? Actually, it's quite simple...

body {
font-size: 16px;
#font-size: auto;
}

...and that's it. Even IE6/Win will see the second rule, but nothing else will.

I'd just prefer if I could set a minimum size that no type can go under. That way I just set the default size to 12pt (12px) and the min size to 9pt (9px). I'm not blind and I don't like windows users assuming I am. Even on windows, the size on webpages is too big and reduces the amount of content on the screen.

14pt is supported. With language of my country (Japan) as for 16pt
it's too large.

What 16pt is designated as standard is troubled very.

I use IE, Safari and Camino every day and only when I'm using Safari do I find myself manually increasing the font size every few minutes. Especially on sites that use CSS ems. When a stylesheet uses anything less than 1.0 em, the text is way too small in Safari.

That's my reason.

I'm in favor of 16 because many sites scale their fonts using relative CSS based on defaults found in the majority of browsers (16). Often they scale them smaller. This leaves text unreadable (by default) in Safari.

Yes, a user could increase font size. But as a Web Administrator I can assure you that the vast majority of surfers are unaware of the possibility.

16pt is horrid (as a default), 14pt is livable, but I am goign to go ahead and keep setting mine back to 12pt (in my opinion the entirely proper and appropriate font size for any and all defaults).

It seems to me that font sizes are all over the place on the web. And people's opinions are as well.

I like the idea of doing what IE does since people who aren't happy with IE probably know how to change font size. I also like having a minimum font size preference (but, unlike Mozilla, you should be able to shrink the font manually below that limit with the splat-minus).

And, for a little blasphemy, I would love to have mouse-wheel support for font changing (splat-roll) since for most browsing there should be no reason to take your hand off of the mouse for a two-key combination. To handle those cycloptic apple mice, you could do splat-drag.

Thanks for the great work so far,
Peter

I find a lot of web sites with two problems: fonts too small to read, and lines too long to read. The two go hand in hand, especially when the designer fails to use CSS. As long as screens keep getting larger/denser, and people keep specifying type in ridiculous units like pixels, there will need to be an occasional increase in the default size.

If we actually had browsers that treated points like the resolution-independent unit of measure that it is, a lot of these problems would go away.

-j

smaller = better

Don't use the pt scale at all....

px is much better for pixel precision on web pages, IMO. Too often have I seen a site look different, fonts made unintelligeble, due to differences in pt font sizing in different browsers/platforms.

I guess this is directed more towards web designers though...

I vote for the standard 16pt. 14 is too small at higher resolutions, and nowadays the norm is 800x600 or 1024-768. 16pt works best for both, imo. As others have said, as long as there is the option to change it, I don't care either way.

I prefer my fonts a little smaller, but as a developer I am tired of fighting the huge differences in the look of my work across all possible across platforms.

Much as I dislike mimicking anything from windows horsey interface, I know the unwashed masses are all expecting bigger defaults. Set the default to 16 and while you're at it make the default form fields and buttons reasonably consistant with IE too.

I think 16pt would be OK, but the current size is great. I think you have better things to do with your time than worry about such a minor issue.

Making safari more compatible with forms and giving the ability to change background and foreground colours in input boxes would be a more valuable use of programming time.

Overall, I love Safari. You are doing a great job.

Bruce

More important than what the default size is, is the ability to have a selectable dpi. The pixels on i&powerbooks are small, so fonts need to be a bit bigger. While i can set a default minimum font size (via hidden prefs), many sites use such small sizes that EVERYTHING ends up at my minimum size (12 pt). It would be best if i could just say "scale all fonts by 125%" (without my having to hit cmd-+ on every single window i open), and/or "treat 12 pts as 12 honest typographic points, i.e. 1/6 inch on my screen."

I use 16 as my default and would prefer it in any future version of Safari. In part it's because I'm older than most geeks and my eyesight ain't what it used to be. But I switched recently from Win to Mac and I've got to say that the tiny stuff Mac folk have to try to read is way too small even for "good-looking" people.

So 16 gets my vote.

I think 14pt is better than 16pt. Make it bigger is very Window-ish.

If people dislike 14pt, they could always edit the option. 14pt seem to be more popular than 16pt.

16px/96ppi default size has been used on both Mac and Windows in IE, Netscape, and Mozilla since 2000. Web designers who wish to use scalable type (ems, CSS font size keywords) *RELY* on the fact that all users will start from the same base. The only two excellent browsers that break this convention are Camino and Safari. The result is that ems-based and keyword-based typography is often too small in Camino and Safari and this hurts Safari and Camino users. Could talk to you about this for hours but am traveling, alas. Please keep an open mind about 16px default. Yes, it is unbearably ugly, but nearly everyone designs around it. When you don't support the same base font size as 99% of the other good browsers out there, you inadvertently put Mac users in a position where text on many web pages will be small and possibly even illegible ... and hurting Mac users is the last thing you want to do, as we all know.

Make it standard to 16. Also, keep it changeable (via pref) for those who wants it smaller...

The problem as I see it is that 'pt' isn't actually 1/72" any more. (And I know the 'real' pt isn't exactly 1/72).

What would be really cool would be to honor 'pt' as it really is. That is, determine the dpi of the screen (how?) and the current resolution, and have 12pt actually be 12pt, as measured with a ruler on the screen, regardless of the resolution!

Of course, the number of pages that this would break would be astonishing... (It would almost be worth it for that reason alone :-)

On a more practical note---would it at least be possible to map the default not to 14 or 16 pt, but rather to the 'correct' size, based on the current screen resolution?

While a user-configurable preference is the right idea, I think 14 is the right default.

Meta-note: Anyone who really thinks “As long as it’s changeable, the default doesn’t matter” is unqualified to be taking part in this discussion. There will be some measurable percentage of Safari users who do not have the time, motivation, knowledge, and energy required to change their font size from the default, and Dave is asking what the default should be for *them*.

Geeks, naturally, will underestimate the size of that percentage. And every new preference introduced — such as text zoom, separate image zoom, DPI setting (c’mon, surely OS X is smart enough to figure that out itself?), and minimum font size — will increase the percentage who can’t find or understand the existng preferences. For some of these preferences, the average change in usability will be positive; for others it will be negative.

W.r.t. Zeldman’s comment, any Web designer who “*REL[IES]* on the fact that all users will start from the same base” is stupid — the whole idea of relative sizes is that they’re relative to *whatever* the user’s preferred size is. Unfortunately, given the stupidty of Web designers, he’s probably still right. :-)

I agree 100% with mpt. It's very stupid that certain web designers rely on the fact that most browsers have a 16 px default, but it's pretty much the way the web is. It's kind of the same type of deal as the not going by the web standards arguments. People could go on debating this for weeks...

I personally believe the default setting should be the most widely compatible setting. And in my experience, the most widely compatible setting is the setting that most browsers since 2000 use, 16 px fonts, as zeldman said.

IMO, doing that is in the best interest of the people who are not going to head to the prefs to change anything.

Dumb but sincere question: why is 15pt not under discussion? It's not like Safari is using the 14pt/16pt bitmaps, so..?

Go with 14 pt.

Unless the Mac OS becomes a 96dpi system, 16 will just look balky. It's bad enough that OS X has a tendency to use screen space less efficiently (i.e. the scalable menubar) - using a large typeface size in a web browser serves only to exacerbate the issue.

I'm all for 14 pt. It looks right: clean, sleek and perfect for the Mac.

12

All the fonts in MacOS are *way* too big.

I don't really care what the default is, 14 or 16, although my personal preference is 14. What I do care strongly about is that if the CSS author specifies "12pt" type that the type is the same number of dots on the screen in all browsers on all platforms as long as the user hasn't changed their browser defaults.

Take a look at sun.com. The default font size is "10pt". Points, not pixels, because Netscape 4 for Solaris (and Netscape 4 for many Linux users) don't render the equivalent "12px" as nicely. Looks like nice 10pt/12px type in IE Win. Looks nice in Nav 4 on all platforms. Looks nice in Mozilla. Looks much, much bigger in IE Mac and Safari. If "12px" had been used, IE Mac would have rendered the font at the same size as IE Win."

It's good that Safari renders points the same as IE Mac, but it would be better it if rendered points at the same size as IE Windows. Specifying type in points makes for design and coding challenges because IE Mac and Safari work differently than the majority. Specifying type in pixels works but isn't a good idea for all sites. Yes, percentages of an em is the way to go, but not until sites can drop Nav 4 support and use CSS for layout. Until then, many of us are stuck with pixels and points.

To avoid creating IE Mac / Safari specific CSS files, I wish these programs would render type at the same size as IE Win. For many clients, Macs are a small share of the market and they can't justify the cost of Mac-specific development.

I would much prefer 14, but a preference would be acceptable (with the default at 14)

I hear v76 has an option to manipulate all fonts embedded into pages to the users liking through the Prefs...

With 72dpi, 16 looks too big. Go with 14. True, other browsers use 16, but they're at 96dpi, so 16 looks smaller.

I think 16pt would be good to be in line with other browsers, but I think it's just as critical that Safari let you specify the density of your display in the prefs, just as IE, Mozilla, and iCab do (through the use of an on-screen ruler that you match up against a physical ruler). This way, it can render CSS relative-size fonts consistently with other browsers, regardless of the particular combination of platform, browser, OS display density, and actual display density that you're discussing.

Ultimately, even trying to match text to point sizes instead of pixels won't work, since graphics and other elements are pegged to pixels. However, pegging it to pixels won't work since DPI varies so much.

Dave, go with your gut, and make it a simple preference (which it is already).

I think the real design issues we deal with as developers begin when browsers think they know better than what the defacto standard has made everybody conform to (as far as page rendering goes). Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge standards fan. Even though I hate to say it, 16 is what most all the web, has and will continue to be designed to. I agree it should definately be an option for those who understandard and actively want to customize to their own tastes however...

One of the reason that i am not using Safari is font displaying, i hate jaguar font displaying, no more pixeled fonts, everything is smooth.

Safari renders my 11px fonts too blurry. I use Chimera and Mozilla.

Font smothing should be available for fonts sizes equal or bigger than 16 px

Web designers are stupid for using relative font-sizes? News to me. Last I heard, web designers used ems and percentages because they allowed font-size to be scaled in any browser, including IE/Win. Last I heard, the standards advocated using relative sizes for greater accessibility, rather than deliberately overriding a user's default settings. We're sorry you feel this is idiocy.

The majority of sites tweak fonts in some way or another away from the ugly 16pt default we've been stuck with for years. So, a default that's different from the other browsers on the market is going to be irrelevant for most sites and disastrous for many; and for those who care about typography and Macs it will just mean another round of hacks to get text looking nice for everyone. So, 16pt seems the least trouble for all concerned.

16 is preposterously large, 12 is usually just fine, and 14 makes for a good compromise between a decent default size and the way most websites insist on displaying smaller type.

Most of all, make the Larger and Smaller buttons part of the standard Safari interface. I use them constantly to make text the right size for reading on my display.

one of the many things that make safari better than any other browser is the smaller default fontsizes. so if the decision was between 16 and 14, I'd definitely vote for 14pt.

First thing I do when installing Safari is setting the default font size to 12 or 13. Much too big otherwise...

I use a 12" PB, and I find that the current default (in v60) is too small - I've hit the + button once to get it to something more legible. I am a recent switcher, and one of the things that has puzzled me is the way fonts on the mac generally look so small.

The first thing I do when installing *any* browser on my Mac OS X system is set the default sans-serif font to 12px Lucida Grande and the default font to use sans-serif. This then looks nice, is readable and matches the system.

My iBook only has 1024x768 resolution, and anything above 12px wastes screen real estate ... don't get me started on how Mac OS X wastes screen real estate anyway!

When I design web sites, I use exact pixel sizes in CSS so I know that the fonts and the layout should look pretty much the same on most browsers. Any browser worth its keep allows these sites to be scaled anyway, don't they? ;-)

As far as a user default goes, how about an Assistant application that lets you choose from some on screen examples the first time you run Safari? That way the newbies get to choose a default that looks good on their system ... just an idea!

I use a PC mostly and a little 12.1" Mac laptop sometimes. I'd prefer not 14 on the Mac. I have Safari permanently turned up a notch to 18, as I find 14 too small. I don't like squinting at text, and I'm not even elderly. It also makes some fluid layouts on pages that don't have oceans of text look odd to me, too - and very different to how they look on a PC.

The same as IE would be nice. Doesn't W3 suggest 16 as a standard?

most sites are optimized for 16pt. It causes me no end of pain having to design sites that look good with two different font sizes and I usually end up just using fixed sizes.

I use 13 :-P
Don't use most pages css with fixed font sizes?

So, we need to set the font size to 16, because 'most sites scale down from the base'... that's just another reason why Safari should _not_ use 16. We need the DESIGNERS to start making some real code, that is not merly workarounds, for aorkarounds, for workarounds...

Gee.... get a life, and disply a note when IE comes to your site instead...

Well... For us people who use Apple's new 20'' cinema displays(which have a higher resolution than the 22'' cinema displays had on a much smaller screen), size 14 seems REALLY small. I would prefer it be set to size 16.

It only seems right to me that Apple's web browser should work well with all of Apple's monitors.

14pt mac = 16pt windows
Also add your font to set to "normal" size. IT IS ANNOYING to change the font sizes a bunch of times, to find out you have no way to re-view it in the "normal" size that the page would render in. ADD THE OPTION!!!!!!!

Definitely 16 pt. It's the default of 95% of the browser world. Whether or not that is "good" isn't up for discussion. At least starting from some sort of similar place would be immensely helpful to those of us that are web developers.

I see that in your latest hypothetical builds, you have "fixed" the way bitmapped fonts render. Well, I used to agree with the conservatives here. But after seeing it in real life, it looks horrible. Any mix of bitmapped and anti-aliased type looks frankly like crap. And any bitmapped fonts below the drawn sizes are unreadable. Please bring back the old way :(

Alun David Bestor, if you took the time to read something properly before disagreeing with it, you’d save time in the long run. Web designers are not “stupid for using relative font-sizes”. They are stupid, and I quote, if they “*RELY* on the fact that all users will start from the same base” for those relative font sizes. That is, they shouldn’t be using a percentage so small that it’s unreadable from a base of 14 or 12 rather than 16.

Jakob, I agree that it’s rather silly for browsers to set large defaults just so designers can scale them down. (In the long run, I suspect, that may be a vicious cycle.) Unfortunately, unless there is a mass exodus of Windows users to the Mac in the next decade, Safari’s market share will remain too small to educate designers; meanwhile, Safari users would be suffering. A better tactic (one not damaging to Safari users, though some people would incorrectly think it was a joke) would be for Safari to be hard-coded such that it *never* uses the Verdana font. That font alone is widely relied on by Web designers, but looks really bad at 16px, which is why even Mac-based designers keep specifying smaller-than-normal sizes for sans-serif text.

Go w/ whatever will display the most simiar to Win/IE. When it's not an issue of standards and there is no compelling reason either way, go w/ the majority -- it'll make things that musch easier for web developers and anyone that has to support Mac users w/ regard to websites.

I vote 16. Less headaches for existing pages.

Also, I do like Win IE's option of ctrl+scroll wheel to change font size, fwiw.

Thanks Dave for all the great work and keeping up your blog, etc. Love Safari!

Keep to the same 96dpi as IE - this is what really matters....

Please, 14 not 16 -- unless you change the Safari resolution to 96dpi instead of 72. I use an 12" iBook, and sites like Slashdot look obscene at 16pt on Safari. Every site is designed for IE/Win, but 16pt on IE/Win/96dpi looks like 14pt on Safari/Mac/72dpi.

More important would be the ability to control the colours for unvisited and visited links. The current colour difference is _too_ subtle.

16 is too large -- unless you can afford one of Apple's Cinema Displays. I prefer 12, but 14 is a good compromise.

Stick with the standard, and boost CSS compatibility. Safari doesn't currently use some of the other CSS goodies like "media". Keep good ole "quirks mode" to keep us compatible until we get out the browser war mess left by the 90's.

Good designers should learn the media they work in, and we are far beyond ole "basefont=" days. In print you learn your press, paper, and plate setter. Why is it so hard for designers to actually try to learn the technology they design for. "And" good designers that keep with the tech should continue to write good books/websites to keep us all educated.

The good thing with larger point sizes is that they are reflected on printed outputs.

I have to constantly adjust my text size (View - Make text larger) to get larger print on my hardcopy.

It may be a separate issue, but I shouldn't have to go through another step just to get reasonable text size, instead of the 9 pt. that is currently output.

See what Court stated above. Remember that Micro$oft
had ruined the understanding of point size, a few years
ago. Remember how Mozilla needed to get the framebuffer
DPI setting (72, 96, system etc.), that was added at some
point. (We don't need another of MSIE's abominations ...)

Thanks;

Personally, I'm happy with either one, but if simply increasing the default font size to 16 makes all those sites with crappy design look a little better, then I think you should go for it: For a niche player like Safari, compatibility is king. (I also like the idea of making the font size buttons part of the default set.)

It should default to 12pt, which might be 14px (as it is on my PowerBook) or 16px (as it is on my iMac) or something entirely different.

C'mon, you're Apple, you should _know_ the geometry of the display in question. For external displays, there should be a system-wide px/" or px/pt setting. Again, you're Apple, providing such a dial in the Displays preference pane should be a piece of cake for you.

If anyone's in a position to solve this silly problem once and for all, it should be Apple and Safari/WebCore.

Mark

Why not have a default page (among the preferences) that's local where you'd ask the user "Do you want it THIS SIZE (in 16) or this size (14)?" Let the user set it up, if they can be bothered, and then continue balmily into the future.

That said, I think smaller is better - I find it a constant annoyance in X that fonts which are just perfect in 9 look all wrong (too big) in X. I feel like I get less per screen in X. And I'm using the same screen, just booting between 9 and X.
And kill that accursed antialiasing. Pull it down like one of those dumb gladhanded statues.

Personally, I would prefer 12pt (or 14pt at 96dpi), but definitely not 16pt. On my iBook 16pt is obscenely large. Don't worry so much about what Microsoft does. Explorer is crap. Let's create something better. Besides, if designers care so much about how their text renders, they can always use CSS. As long as there's a minimum font size pref, everyone should be happy.

One feature I've become completely addicted to is the ability to map the scrollwheel on my mouse to font increase/decrease functionality. I'd really like to see this in Safari. Sometimes it's the site, sometimes it's just my eyes are tired - but I find myself using this a lot now.

Couldn't be THAT hard could it ? It's Cocoa after all :-)

RP

Wow. I am completely amazed at this discussion. Everybody seems to agree that IE has 90-something percent of the market, and that web designers do take advantage of this. Everybody posting to this blog seems to have the ability (and the desire) to change default sizes and fonts to almost anything else, and about 18 bazillion different reasons for doing so.

Because the default is never going to satisfy the the people who twiddle this stuff anyway, asking that group the question *at all* makes no sense. Who you want to ask are people who usually use Windows or IE on the Mac, and find out if they prefer the 16 point default for the reasons you might suspect, and, if they do, give it to them. In the long run, everybody will end up getting what they settle for, and I believe there will be enough other advantages to Safari so that anybody who is really torqued by the font-handling (outside of the "choosing the wrong small font and anti-aliasing it" bug, which is I guess fixed) will do whatever they really want, while everybody else will get the experience they expect.

Dave

Please listen to Zeldman.

The future of web design is (or should be) all about layouts that use scalable font sizing schemes (ems and % rather than pixels) and, as he says, the standard since 2000 has been 16px. As you pointed out in your table handling post the other day, standards (even if they sometimes appear counter-intuitive) are important for web designers who want to make the web a more consistant and usable place.

First thing I do when installing IE is go change 96 dpi to 72 and 16pt fonts size back to 12. In fact my font size in Safari is set to 12 pts as well - anything bigger is just a waste of screen real-estate.

I totally agree that having font +/- buttons would be the best option for those that like to tweak, and although I personally can't stand reading FRICKING HUGE POINT SIZE TEXT, 16 pts should be the default to match IE, for the convenience of web designers, and less confusion among the unwashed masses.

Just tried the new Safari v71. Very nice. Good speed, Macromedia.com is almost working.

But I still have some problems with the cache handling. Working as a webdesigner, I reload the same page very often, and I have to empty the cache with the Debug menu to see the changes. I'd like a cache preferences with : never - once per session - always.

The other thing is the famous bug with popups opening at wrong sizes. I was very surprised to see that the bug was killed... but when I looked closer, I saw the window was always 2 pixels too large, and 1 pixel too high.

... and the bug that displays the scrollbars when not required (popup opened with a javascript with scrollbars=no) seems to be back...

The default should definitely be 16. Safari is intended as the everyman browser, and it should be compatible with as many web pages as possible.

I use Lucida Grande, 13.

16 is quite possibly the ugliest thing on the planet. Dave, stick with 14. I don't want to think at any point in time I'm on a windows box with gigantic fonts that make the web look down-right ugly.

If people want a bigger font size, they wll make it bigger.

The closer Safari is to I.E., the fewer headaches Mac web designers will have. If 16pt is default in Windows I.E. (really it's a matter of default screen resolution, 96dpi versus 72dpi) then Safari should be the same.

My argument is: If 90% of the users on the web are browsing with I.E for Windows, Safari MUST follow certain display conventions and render pages similarly and as exact as possible to Windows I.E., otherwise, what's the point of using the Mac as a web design platform?? Print fine, but Web... uh, less headaches would be nice.

If too many people are against 16pt default font size for whatever reason, at least provide a configurable button that a designer can use to "preview like Windows I.E." Apple needs to take things like this into consideration and start building software that makes work EASIER for creatives.

Arve Bersvendsen really said everything I would want to say about this many comments ago:

Many authors will then opt to use em's or % to size fonts, typically in the range 0.7 - 0.8em, something that would typically still be readable to most users - _when the base font size is 16px_.

16 was a bad choice way back when; but the web has adapted around it. To change it now will hurt those who try to do things right (by specifying sizes relative to the default) the most.
16 definitely is the way to go. (Not to mention that 16 is way easier to work with than 14.)

My default font is 12pt Lucida Grand. This is the most optimal size for my viewing on my 12" iBook. However, because IE uses a default size of 16, many sites reduce the font (either through em or simply -1 or -2). That then becomes unreadable on my screen, forcing me to bump the font size. Because Microsoft picked a default size that most people don't find comfortable, many web site designers override the defaults, screwing over those users that actually set the default font faces and sizes based on personal preference.

If a site has any significant amount of text, but has ignored my defaults, I frequently find myself bumping the text size, and occasionally decreasing it (Register UK). I agree with a previous poster regarding adding font increase/decrease buttons to the toolbar (optionally). I personally wouldn't use the buttons, because CMD+ and CMD- are easy to type.

Here is an idea: Consider user font increase/decrease a temporary change. Have SnapBack restore the font size settings, discarding any temporary override that was performed for intervening pages.

I'll "ditto" matt and Brian Smith - text size buttons as standard buttons in Safari, and Safari should lean towards modern Web standards.

As a user I often change the text size and I imagine other would too if they were standard Safari buttons. (I even manually pop up the Address Bar in this comment window to click it a step larger.)

I currently have my two 19" CRTs set to 1280x1024, so 16-point is a minimum. However, Lord only knows how many CRT iMacs are still out there running at, of course, 800x600.

I even have two clients running their CRT iMacs at 640x480 because they are 80+ years-old and their vision isn't what it used to be. These clients are still using Mac OS 9, so they are not using Safari, but any new machine they get you can rest assured that they will need big type. And before someone mentions the Universal Access functions, they wont use them, because "I am not disabled!"

You also should be looking forward to the day when monitors are 200ppi.

There! Clear as mud. Now you don't know what point size to pick! ;-)

I think the default size issue is secondary. From what I can tell, resolution (72 or 96dpi) is the main issue, and this is usually derived from the browser's UserAgent compatibility string.

I maintain the HTML for my small company's web site (www.sophisticated.com), and I recently had to go through the process of designing our site so that (in the words of the boss) "everyone sees more or less the same thing". The biggest issue for me was the resolution of the client. I found that with the exception of Safari (and the mess that is iCab), all browsers that claim Mozilla-5-compatibility rendered at 96dpi.

I ended up writing a Javascript browser-sniffer that figures out what browser is being used and sends the matching style sheet. Right now, Safari is handled as a special case in that sniffer. I see many other web sites that do *not* do this, and since Safari claims to be Mozilla-5 compatible, all the text on those pages is rendered too small.

Also, for the record, I define all styles in terms of ems, so user clients can use default font sizes as desired.

So for me, the main issue is which browser Safari claims compatibility with. Currently (and I don't have access to the later betas), Safari's UserAgent string says it's Mozilla-5-compatible, which to my knowledge defaults to 96dpi. It seems to me that if this is so, it should render the same as Mozilla.

If you'd like to see my sniffer code (and don't laugh too hard :-) ), feel free to load .

Oops, my web site URL disappeared from the last sentence of my post. You can just click on my name to see the site, and I'll try again without the brackets: http://www.sophisticated.com.

"the standard since 2000 has been 16px" which translates to 12pt:

http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/internet-course/font-size-comparisons.html

I wonder if Dave really meant 16pt or 16px. 16pt would be preposterous. The type on this discussion page is too small because it's "small".

Please, please, please do the right thing, and make it 16, with a preference to change it if the user wants. That way designers at least have a basic guideline that they can assume (or at least hope) that the user has their font sizes set to.

Also, Mozilla / Camino / Phoenix's defaults to 16 as well as IE for Windows, right? It makes sense to stick with what is an unofficial standard.

In addition to the +/- for changing the font size, can you also add someway to return to the default? Sometimes I use the +/- but it is difficult to return to the original size.

Okay, so the summary of all this stuff is:

1) set the dpi value to the real, physical number that depends on the actual screen in use.

2) set the default font size to whatever renders the same physical size as IE's 16pt on a typcal PC display.

Will that work? Then web pages designed for IE will look right, and at the same time Safari will support real point units independent of the users resolution.

Peter

Seems like Apple has this covered:

http://developer.apple.com/internet/fonts/fonts_sizing.html

http://developer.apple.com/internet/fonts/fonts_gallery.html

So, it should be 12pt if the default is 72 PPI or 16pt if 96 PPI.

Well. that cleared everything right up. Aren't you glad you asked? :)

Historical background on 16px/96ppi de facto cross-platform type standard: In a 1998 letter to W3C (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/ Public/www-style/1998Dec/0030.html), UI expert Todd Fahrner wrote:

Since before Mosaic, the default font size value in all major browsers has been set at 12pt. I propose redefining the default as 16px.... The current default of 12pt rasterizes very differently across platforms. On Macs, it rasterizes into 12px (logical res fixed at 72ppi). On Wintel PCs, it rasterizes by default into 16px (logical res defaults to 96ppi).

...All scalable font-size values... operate relative to this inconsistent base rasterization. For a designer, this means that the only way to suggest a [consistent cross-platform] font size is to use CSS pixel units, which are not user-scalable [in any browser at the time of Fahrner's note; they are still not user-scalable in IE/WIN], and are thus not optimally user-friendly/ portable...

The appropriate corrective measure... is for Mac ... browsers to break with tradition and ship with the default value of "medium" text set at 16px, instead of 12pt. This should of course remain subject to user adjustment, but a consistent initial value will at least make the use of scalable font-size values less problematic for designers, as any variance from the default will be due to express user preference rather than capricious legacy OS differences....

[This was done by Gecko/Netscape/IE in 2000 and is now a defacto standard.]

The 1996 CSS1 standard suggests a 1/90" value for a "reference pixel," extrapolated from a visual angle of 0.0227 degrees visual angle at arm's length. [User agents] are expected to scale pixels appropriately if the physical resolution is known to vary significantly from this value. A 1/90" reference pixel would suggest a rasterization of 12pt into 15px, rather than 16. 15 is, of course, much closer to 16 than to 12, however. Because no OS/UA currently assumes a 90ppi logical resolution (nor implements pixel-scaling) ... the reference pixel value should be amended to 1/96". It's simple to preserve the suggested 0.0227 degrees visual angle by giving the reference user a longer arm's length.

Really, the best way to determine this would be a survey of novice users. That said, add the font size buttons to the toolbar by default, and set the default to something which will generate text without explicit font size markup no larger than 14 points.

I have my default set to 14 points :) and more often find myself needing to reduce the font size of pages than increase it. (And consider this ... does your word processor default to 16-point text? Why not?)

A survey of novice users would be the wrong approach. The issue is not what looks best. Most of us would agree that smaller type looks better. The issue is a fairly sophisticated one involving standards, scalability, and limitations in the web's most-used browser (i.e., inability to scale pixel values in IE/Win). The practical issues involved require knowledge novices lack. (Even if you were designing a car for young, first-time car buyers, you probably wouldn't want to ask them where the transmission should go.)

1. Have a setup Assistant that allows to set the default font size based on some rendered Text (e.g.: Pick the default size, pick the smallest size you can read comfortably)
2. If a web page hits the minimum size, scale all other sizes accordingly (optional)
3. another option would be to allow scaling based on the "actual base font size": Since we have all discovered web designers don't care for our settings, it would be cool to be able to say: "No matter what the web-designer said, I want the main portion of the text to be 12.376pt big" (unless that would result in a serious rendering speed problem, perhaps a good way to handle this would be a cache for font sizes on various sites that are cached/overridden for individual pages, so the browser doesn't need to wait rendering until all data is loaded/parsed) This could also be implemented using a magic "page enhance button" a lá iPhoto 2 ;-)

4. (pt vs. px) For other spacing things have and use a system wide display resolution setting. For most Current Hardware the Mac could know the actual resolution since there are quite a few Apple Displays out there. I used iCab's "Measure" feature to determine my LCD actually has 91 dpi.
This would probably be more beneficial for all Apps that show wysiwyg, so 100% Magnification would really mean "as on paper".

For the record, i use 12 pt according to Safari's Prefs.
iSee

CSS 2.1 Working Draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units) says:

It is recommended that the reference pixel be the visual angle of one
pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the
reader of an arm?s length. For a nominal arm?s length of 28 inches,
the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees.

[While the standard reference pixel would seem to clear the way for a W3C
standard user default size, the two are not officially related. The W3C has
spoken to the first issue, but not to the second. Nevertheless, most browser
makers are treating 16px/96ppi as a de facto standard, and many designer/
developers code accordingly.]

>

well, there aren't just two screen resolutions out there. The Macintosh platform is used by many graphic arts professionals -- their software must handle the conversion from point size to pixels already.

“Have a setup Assistant that allows to set the default font size...”

Dave, let this be a lesson to you. Never, never, never ask a bunch of geeks what the default should be, for anything.

Half of them will, off-topic, suggest making it a preference (even though it *already is*). Half of them will, off-topic, suggest having toolbar buttons to adjust it. And a few people — those who think the average Mac user has nothing better to do with her life than answering annoying questions — will, off-topic, suggest having a *setup assistant* to ask the user (see also http://groups.google.co.nz/groups?selm=henris-977048.15515605052000%40uutiset.saunalahti.fi). Sheesh.

And those who *do* actually suggest a default will disagree so violently that making a decision will be even more difficult than it was before. :-)

14. Because 16 looks like "screaming" to me.

OK, all you people here who say, "Oh, but I like 14, I want 14, you should make 14 the default for everybody, because *I* like it". You are the smart kind of people who would know to go the the preferences and set it your way. Fine. Great. But to all the stupid people out there, who don't know what the difference is (and one could argue these kind of people would be correlated closely to old people and people who use Windows) would find 14 too hard to read, and not just feel right compared to what they are used to seeing. 16 is the best option, and thats what the mac ie 5 developers knew, and did right. And the people who wanted 14 could have thier cake too.

Making 14 default is only going to force developers like me to use all kinds of hacks to accomodate Safari, Safari should just work out of the box, and by work, i mean render the same as the rest of the 95% of the world renders it. The web is just 96 dpi 16pt. Live with it. Or set it your way as a concious option.

BTW, Cheers David, you rock!

Try viewing this page in Safari: http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=43026

HORRIBLE.

Also, to the people saying "oh, it's just a simple CSS fix! The default doesn't matter!", most of us view pages other than our own. Even though we can fix problems on our own page, we can't just go around and fix everyone else's.

People who are saying "14 because it looks better on my Mac" shouldn't care about the default, because they are obviously smart enough to care about the size, as Joseph said. so they will be smart enough to change the prefs.

To justify an argument for a default setting, you're gonna need more than just "It looks better on my Mac". That goes for both sides of the argument. I can make it look any way I want on my Mac, and people who are visiting this blog are almost all certainly going to be doing some sort of customization or another. The default is for the average-Joe user who isn't going to go around and change prefs. All they want to do is browse the web. And the only thing they are going to notice is that this site that looks fine in other browsers is screwed up in Safari. No, it shouldn't have to be that way, but it's reality. People say that we need to change it, but just one browser trying to protest isn't gonna do much.

To the person saying "True, other browsers use 16, but they're at 96dpi, so 16 looks smaller.", that's completely false. You're confusing dpi and point size. In order to compensate for Windows being 96 dpi, browsers on the Mac, which is ideally 72 dpi, must either increase the font size from 12 to 16 or "fake" 96 dpi. Not both. 16 pt at 96 dpi would be absolutely HUGE, even bigger than IE for Windows currently displays. IE for Windows' default setting (or is it hardcoded? a quick look didn't find a place to change to a specific point size) is 12 pt too, but the dpi makes it look bigger. And that's where the entire argument starts.

To prove my point (at least in Windows 98 on a default settings install): go to a website that doesn't use CSS, just uses a plain old font, not made bigger or smaller, in IE 6 for Windows. Copy some regular sized text from it and paste it into WordPad. Look at the font size of the text you pasted in: it's 12! Windows makes 12 point fonts look bigger on the screen. On the screen, Windows' 9 point is approximately equal to Mac's 12 point. Again, that's where whole problem comes into play. Add in different screen resolutions to the mix, and you have a huge problem. Mac browsers have for a long time made it equal by default by making the font size 16 pt on Mac, which is equal to the 12 pt size on Windows. Safari is the one browser I have seen in the past few years that has gone away from this. I'm not sure about Camino - I have it set at 16, but that might have been me changing the default. Windows displays equal-point-sized text 4/3 times as big as the Mac, assuming you are using the same display at the same resolution and you're using default settings (this may not be EXACTLY true, but close). 4/3 * 12 = 16.

Yikes...sorry for the huge rant folks, but I had to clear up the dpi misconception. If I explained something wrong regarding Mac vs. Windows dpi, please correct me. This blog discussion is starting to get ugly (partly my fault...) :-) All this over a simple default which most of us posting in this blog, if not all, are smart enough to change in the prefs so it doesn't even matter to most of us. Just remember this: it's not about us in these comments, it's about the others who aren't going to change the prefs.

The web is not in this ideal world where everyone listens and makes little CSS hacks to fix browser dpi issues; the web is a huge mess of perfect pages updated plentifully to incorporate the latest fixes, old sites that will never change, non-compliant-with-the-standards sites, yes, sites that make a very dumb inference about browser size settings, and any other situation imaginable. Most of these sites will display perfectly in either dpi/point size setting, except those that make a dumb inference about browser font size settings. Those sites will only display properly in browsers that use 12 point at 96 dpi, or 16 point at 72 dpi. They will look anywhere from ok to extremely mangled in other point sizes/dpis. Most of us, including me, really don't care that those sites are going to change in look. But again, the average Joe user's view will potentially differ. That user is just going to see that the site doesn't look "normal" compared to IE.

So, who wants to compute the minutes of time I have wasted writing this (probably pointless) comment? :)

I made my website use the default user font size, because I think that if a user says he want pages displayed using a 14px font, or a 16px font, his choice should be respected. In fact, how would you explain a newbie that if he were choosing 14px in the preferences most of the page he visits will show as 12px?

In my opinion, the way many web designers are taking is somewhat pathetic. Browsers should never had put the default so big, and web designers (and users) should have protested more about the insane sizes from the start. (Imagine 16px on a standard 640x480 screen in 1997!)

Many of you are telling us not to expect most of the users to change the font size in the preferences. Maybe it's the fault of your boss, maybe it's the fault of the browser, but it's the user choice that is suffering: how can you expect a user to learn about that choice he has if his choice is not respected? Simple, it's too complicated so he won't.

Personally I prefer 14px, but maybe it's because of my iBook 800x600 screen. Many sites I visit use my default size, (macopinion.com, macintouch.com, slashdot.org, macrumors.com, Apple Devloper Documentation (except the index), etc.) and I'm thankful they are.

Well, if there was a build 67 and I was using it, I'd say it looked okay.

However, one way or the other, I ran it through an HTML parser. The results surprised me; the doc claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but it's horribly malformed. There's some excuse for that in HTML, but none at all in XHTML. This is the sort of document that the world would be a better place if it was rejected by every browser in existence.

Sorry... the last was in reply to Nick.

Let the user select 72 dpi or 96 dpi in prefs!!

The issue of font size rendering is impossible to solve as long as the Mac and Pc continue to have different default dpi standards. No matter which font size you pick, some web developer will use a CSS to force the font display other than one likes. Typically it will look great on a PC and too large on a Mac. I find that setting IE to 72 dpi instead of 96 dpi (default) eliminates the clunkiness of large font sizes in the offending sites. Now that Safari v60 defaults to 96 dpi, I have to stick with v51, which is 72 dpi. Please make this setting selectable.

-David Bishop

A couple other people have pointed this out but it bears repeating. The headline is "14px vs. 16px," not, repeat, NOT, "14pt vs. 16pt." The standard being debates is 16 *PIXELS*, not 16 *POINTS.*

In other words, if you look at 16-point text and go "My God, that's too big!", you're misunderstanding the argument. 16px is closer to 12pt.

Hello? Why are we talking about PX? Apple's forté since day one has been WYSIWYG. Why is the default font not in PT and ask the freakin' hardware what the screen dpi is and scale appropriately?

Frickin' PeeCees let you tell them what their screen resolution is (the hardware does not know). But Apple, whose hardware _does_ know, doesn't take advantage of it?!?!

There's something wrong with this picture.

The web designer should be able to design in PTs, just like they do on paper, and the web browser should use it's knowledge of the screen DPI to render the pt-based font accurately. Apple has a big chance to lead the way here. There is no reason for Safari to be 96 or 72dpi, it should ask the hardware what the resolution is (or in the few cases where it can't tell, it should provide a way for the user to measure it and tell).

What is the problem with that? You've got Display Postscript built in to your OS, and if anything knows how to render fonts at different dpi that does. I just don't get why this discussion is even happening...

Most longtime Mac users are used to a 12 or 14 point default. Most Windows users are used to a 16 point default.

I personally think the extra large font default found on Windows machines looks dorky, but like anti-aliasing this choice is a deeply personal preference and I hold no grudges against those who favor 16.

The default setting is mainly an issue for newbies as anyone with any experience will simply change the setting to whatever they want.

I believe Safari, and OS X in general would be well served by program that hand holds newbies through various basic customizations. Long long ago in 1984 the Mac came with such an app that taught newbies basic skills and I remember it was remarkably effective at showing people the basics. It is hard for those of us who grew up with a keyboard in hand to imagine how difficult seemingly trivial navigation/customization issues are for first time users (or switchers).... but I digress.

My vote is for 14 as default (I set mine to 12).

It would also be most appreciated if we could set both the maximum and minimum font size for those browsers that insist on a crazy range of sizes (ain't it cool news for example).

So, lots of people are saying, "no, 14pt looks better!". Or, "no, 16pt looks better!"

I don't care. I can't see small type. I'm going to increase it. I **have** to increase it.

My concern is that when I do so, some pages don't render well at all -- this is the fault of the page designer, it's not Safari's fault. Typically text will start overlapping an absolutely-positioned box.

Pragmatically, then, I would like to see Safari default to the larger size so that web designers try out their pages with larger font sizes, and I am more likely to be able to read their web sites.

That's the bottom line for me. Yes, I like "beautiful" web sites; but part of the beauty of the web is that it gives the browser, not the page designer, control over some things, thus making the world a more accessible place.

I wouldn't mind if Safari defaulted to 16 instead of 14, but I can't stand defaults to 12. I use TinkerTool to up the system font sizes to 14, at least, so it'd be nice if Safari would do so too.

Safari work really good as it is now (14 pt).

A bigger standard font? I think not. At least not for me.

16 please.

It's just one less thing I have to explain when 's art department calls and says their site looks different on the Mac.

As long as I can create ONE VERSION of a page and have it look as similar as possible in all modern browsers, I'll be happy. My fear is that unless Safari matches WinIE as best it can, Mac users' experience will suffer, because while I might take a little additional time (at my expense, not the clients), most people will not pay for it. Then you've got to say "Well it doesn't look great on the Mac, but we can't justify spending more $ on 3% of our users."

The reality is Mac users potentially end up losing out.

My Safari font prefs on a TiBook: StoneInformal 12 and ProFont 9.

Of course, I have /no/ idea whether the page is at "bigger" or "smaller" because Safari v60 fails to show me its current position on the scale. (Court Kizer mentioned this as well.)

The nice thing about Adobe Stone Informal is its large x-height and width, so it's effectively larger than, say, Times 12 (which has a small x-height and width). Funny how no one's mentioned the differences in metrics. So with this in mind, you cannot talk about font sizes without specifying a particular font family/name; it's like saying you wear a size 9 shoe without specifying mens or womens.

Also, this talk about 12pt=14px vs. 12pt=12px needs some clarification. While typographically a 12pt font may indeed take up 14px, there are Mac browsers which consider a 14px font spec to mean 14pt, regardless of leading. Will Safari behave differently from them, and actually measure leading?

As for DPI (PPI?) adjustments, please do NOT put that into Safari. The ONLY place that belongs is in System Preferences, so 12pt in Safari will use exactly the same pixels as 12pt in TextEdit, Illustrator, Excel, and SuperWidgetWeeWah. This is a Macintosh, and cross-application consistency is more than just a good idea -- it's the law. Lobby Apple to unlock Quartz's potential sooner rather than later; this is a chicken and egg problem, and I believe vectorization should come /after/ PPI adjustability -- any resultant jaggies on bitmaps will simply serve as reminders to the engineers that vectorization is on the to-do list. (Whew, what a run-on sentence that was!)

-Walter (not voting w/o knowing what Dave meant by "16px")

"16 pixels" (although I think you might have meant "16 points").

Don't want to hijack the thread and turn it into a platform war, but we NEED parity with IE. Sorry, that's the fact.

I design in ems about 75% of the time, and I wish I could do so 100% of the time. But when look and feel consistency matters, em-for-em the current Safari rendering is just way to small.

Do the right thing, use 16px. It's a de facto standard. Plus, most comments here are biased beacause they're issued by designers, graphic artists, people with good sight (or glasses). Web users as a whole complain about text being too small, not too big. And while texts are never too big, they're often too small.

If Safari wants to be successful, it should make itself work like the dominant browsers (IE and Moz). Using 14px will just make Safari's text unreadibly small on many websites, which will lead people to reject it in favor of another browser that displays the text big enough to read.

3 quotes:

"Never, never, never ask a bunch of geeks what the default should be, for anything."

"No matter what the web-designer said, I want the main portion of the text to be 12.376pt big"

"I don't care. I can't see small type. I'm going to increase it. I **have** to increase it. "

One of the best things with the mac is that it just works out of the box. With some unices, you have to tinker for a few days with settings before you have a working setup.

To get Safari more mac like, I think the default font size should be eliminated (from the settings dialog). Let it be 14 or 16, it shouldn't matter. Let Safari detect the font size of the major body of the text, and scale all font sizes such that the main body is using the fontsize the user prefers.

The user might increase or decrease the body font size using the +/- buttons, and the setting should be global. Not forgotten when the window/tab is closed, and not forgotten when you leave the site.

Most sites today works sort-of-ok (after people adjust the default font size because the +/- setting doesn't stick), and then comes the few odd sites where you have to increase/decrease the fontsize. And when you leave the site again, you have to re-adjust the fontsize.

Let Safari do all the work for the user. Let the user click once or twice on +/- and then have all web pages display in his/her selected font size.

It doesn't really matter as long as the means to override are invitingly clear, meaningful, and easy. That said, I'd lean toward 16px as a default, just because that's what everybody else does.

It's plain that not a lot of people understand pt/px/dpi issues, others don't understand exactly what it is they're adjusting given that authors usually influence or dictate the final rendering, and others just don't know how big/small/good/bad a given font and size will look. All of these things mean that the prefs UI presents more opportunities for improvement than the initial values.

Current prefs UI solicits a single size, as if this were what the user would most likely see most of the time in real Web pages (it isn't). What the user is really influencing, ideally, is how a whole range of sizes will appear. It is especially important for users to understand - and see - how choosing a smallish base font size can lead to illegibly small text when the designer calls for smaller-than-normal.

I've been pushing for a live preview of a range of sizes right in the Prefs panel since before MacIE5 and Mozilla were knee high. Nobody's implemented it yet: http://style.cleverchimp.com/cssui/cssuiprefs.GIF - just the preview pane, showing the 7 CSS font-size keywords rendered relative to the single base size. Slider anyone?

The important thing is not whether 16 px text looks best - most of us wouldn't think so - but whether there is a consistent standard. Like it or lump it, the standard is 16px these days and if that standard is consistent we can design sites that work cross platform with the minumum of fuss.

It may have been nicer for the standard to have been 14px, 13px whatever but it's not going to happen and would break too many sites if it did.

If Safari attempts to buck the trend it will lose out and harm the Mac platform.

We live in a world full of less than perfect standards. I am typing this out on a QWERTY keyboard and will be setting the timer on my VHS VCR later this evening.

The important thing in my opinion is that browser makers stick to established standards, whether they are perfect or not. It will give those of us who make web sites more time to be creative, and those of us who use the web regularly will be able to use the web more effectively.

Wow, I did all this ranting about how it should be 16 with out trying it myself. Damn thats ugly. Now I don't know what to think. The real issue here is that Lucida and Quartz rendering at 16pt are much different than Redmonds 16pt aliased Times...

So, maybe one could argue that someone who isn't specifying the font size, wouldn't be specifying the font either, so 14pt Lucida would work better in the end. This only becomes a problem for the people who do specify the font but use that relative sizing... what a conundrum...

This is a no-brainer! It HAS to be same by default as Mozilla and Explorer.

Please don't go back to the bad old days of Mac IE which had a smaller size making loads of text unreadable.

All the other theory being discussed matters not - that is the reality of it.

Oh yeah - and listen to Zeldman - he's talking more sense than is commonly heard!

I design with standards and ems 100% of the time. If the text size looks appropriate in 99.9% of standards compliant browsers -- I'm happy. If Safari or whatever else chooses to not comply with a de facto 16px standard, well... I don't care. What I don't like though, are rogue browsers that add pain (there is enough already!) to web building process. Remember the crippling "browser wars" of 1990s? I vote for consistency. 16.

http://style.cleverchimp.com/cssui/cssuiprefs.GIF

Wow, Todd - that is awesome!

Dave, *please* do something like this. I'd deal with the default being 16 if we had a dialog like that. Simply awesome.

Please use 16px as a default font. As a web designer who uses ems to size the text on my web sites, I'd prefer constancy across browsers.

If you go with 14px, it could get us into the whole font-size: x-small vs. xx-small debacle that plagued relatively sized type a couple years back.

Thanks for asking.
Doug

Speaking as a Web developer, I have to say that I really don't care what Safari does. I develop and test with Mozilla, since that's the same on Win and Mac, and check/tweak on IE (which usually looks close enough, so I don't generally have to change much). I do not test on Safari and don't intend to start doing so. Franky, I don't care what my pages look like in Safari, OmniWeb, iCab, etc.

It's not as simple just 16 or 14. The relative sizing of any glyph varies greatly between fonts. If Safari is going to use Lucida as the default, then it would make sense to use 14pt for that font.

This may sound crazy, but what if it was 14pt default if the font was not specified in the html or css. But any element that had specified a font would use the 16pt default 'Redmond Defacto Standard'...

Crazy?

I've already adopted Safari as my browser of choice at home, but I design for a popular website and we have to deal with the reality that over 90% of our visitors are using IE/Netscape/Gecko. We're in the process of switching thousands of pages of "old skool" HTML into more standards-compliant CSS using relative font-sizing.

Safari stands out like the proverbial "sore thumb" with the smaller text and gives more ammunition to the anti-Mac crowd (which includes my boss).

If you really want folks to make the switch, you have to make it as easy as possible. This browser already rocks -- this change would make it roll.

16px.

I'm a web designer and the bottom line is that 90% of web designers, like it or not, will design for the masses. Consistency is important, and if you're browser is being inconsistent it will simply be ignored.

Sorry for the wrong topic :

If a v71 safarie was leaked on the internet, and if someone would have tested it, he would have had trouble with redicrected websites with the pho command

header("Location:

wich did work in v60

Ultimately the decision should be based on what will deliver the best browsing experience for Safari users. As most sites are designed primarily with browsers other than Safari in mind, and those conscientious developers using ems will usually be specifying values smaller than 1, anything less than 16px will inflict a large amount of barely legible text on Safari users.
Few sites use the default size, so it's not about whether 14px looks better, it's about what works best for real sites.
(the whole issue of how operating systems handle display resolution goes way beyond text size and won't be resolved for some time)

Wow, lots of complete confusion on this subject. I didn't help things by initially using the term "pt" in my blog entry when I meant pixels.

Whenever you pick a value in the font prefs of Safari, Mozilla, etc., you are picking a pixel value, not a point value. So Safari's default is actually 14 *pixels*, not 14 *point* (by the CSS definition of point).

CSS has the units "px" and "pt". The default font is in px units. On screen, this ends up being exactly the pixel height you specified.

Where the 96dpi value comes in is with the CSS "pt" unit. When you specify 12pt, that ends up being scaled, since according to CSS, a "pt" is 1/72nd of an inch. So 1pt = 96/72 pixels. In other words, Safari will treat 12pt like a 16px font.

Currently everybody defaults to 96dpi. Safari fixed that problem as did Camino. So now all browsers are obeying the 96dpi value. Some browsers let you tweak this value (e.g., Mac IE).

So IMO dpi isn't really relevant to the discussion of whether the default font size should be 14px or 16px, since the default font size is unaffected by dpi changes (being specified in pixels and not points).

Only if the dpi value changes substantially (becomes quite large) would you get into the CSS pixel unit being scaled.

Someone slap me if I've said anything that's incorrect, but I think that's how it works.

Okay...I'm now totally confused about the pt vs. px thing. All I know is that after I set my font to Times New Roman 16, the font was exactly the same on IE and Safari, and that's the behavior I think should be the default. (The size anyway. I don't really care about the font face)

There is so much confusion over this, and so many parameters, that I'm not sure what to do. I experimented with 16 as my default size, and it looked horrible, except for my friend with poor vision. I switched back to 14... whatevers.

The font problem that does bother me is printing. I wish Safari had print preview, and a "fit to page" setting like IE, kaff kaff. Right now, pages print about 2/3 size, and I haven't been able to figure out how to change it.

PowerMac G4 867 Quicksilver, 17" screen set to 1280 x 1024, and an Epson C80 printer.

The important thing is not the default size - it is making size choices consistent across websites. There are so many different ways of specifying a font size - through CSS, through the tag, through and related tags... as an absolute size or a relative size...

Different people are going to need different default sizes. Monitors are larger or smaller, higher-dpi or lower. People sit at different distances from the screen, and thus font size is tied very closely to ergonomics. People's eyes are weaker or stronger.

Since everybody's preferences are going to be different, the default does not matter in the slightest. This is an area where even a completely nontechnical person is going to have a preference, and a strong one!

What it's not currently possible to do well in any browser is say "I want to use 16 point for all body text on every site, regardless of what size the site's author thinks I want". A large part of the problem is distinguishing body text from header text... some heuristics are probably needed in the browser. Similarly of course, one should be able to set the size for header text, caption text, ...

Resolution should NOT be fixed at 96dpi because dpi is not a standard, it's a screen measurement. Use a "ruler" like MacIE's in the preferenecs. And if you detect an Apple display (or an otherwise known one), set the DPI to what you know it is. There is no "96dpi standard" because there's no standard for monitor resolution. They're all over the map. IE's ruler tells me that my Samsung 17" at 1280x1024 is 96dpi (but that's a flat panel, and a CRT is less visible area, so it wouldn't necessarily hold for a CRT). I had an old Apple CRT that was 107.something at the resolution I used it at. Pts are clearly defined as being relative to inches, not screen pixels, so the only correct way to do it to spec is to measure screen dpi and render pts accordingly.

As a follow on to that, your default size should be in points, not pixels. Make the default 12 points, and at 96dpi it'll be 16 pixels, but more importantly, no matter what the DPI, it'll render at the same physical size (1/6 of an inch).

In fact, I would like to see DPI setting (or detection) on a systemwide level so that when I choose 12pt in ANY app, that's 12pt, not 12px.

just my 2 cents...

You *have* to default to 96dpi, or pages will simply look wrong all over the Web. The fundamental problem is that sites mix px and pt sizes, so the relationship between them has to match Windows by default, e.g., 12pt simply has to equal 16px by default. It's sad, but true.

I'm open to providing a DPI slider or the ability to configure DPI, but it should *always* default to 96dpi and not to your system's DPI.

You need to auto detect the screen dpi/ppl and if you can't ask the user to input what it is via a small graphic in the prefs that the user can hold a ruler to etc... to get their dpi

it should be

72dpi 12px
84dpi 14px
96dpi 16px

My screen

108dpi 18px

16.. let's not have another thing different in safari eh? If I specify 100% for size, it should be the standard 16px as the starting point, not something less. Also, a bigger default while less pretty is at least more readable.

Arguments for using points instead of pixels for Web text sizing, and using an accurate ppi to govern the ultimate conversion into pixels, are internally consistent and have a long history. But they are wrong.

They assume that there is value in representing physical lengths like points accurately on screen, such that you can hold a measure to the display and things line up (strict WYSIWYG). This was a nifty Mac/ImageWriter marketing gimmick in the mid-80s. More often, given the coarseness of current display technology relative to human visual acuity, WYSIWYG ends up discarding a lot of potentially useful data. It's not wrong to want things magnified (or reduced), particularly once you consider viewing distance. Nobody complains that peoples' faces are several feet tall at the theater, or less than an inch on a portable TV. Why is the computer display so different? Because it's sometimes used to proof items destined for print? Why is that useful when the screen pixel grid is so much looser than that of the printer? This is what happens when the designer's logical ppi is higher than that of the viewer, and physical units like pts are used: http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size/points/font_wars.GIF . Thank goodness those days are mostly over.

They assume also that keeping logical and physical resolutions aligned is something that more than 0.01% of users will ever even understand, much less actually perform. They ding the Mac for being stuck at 72ppi logical res while it's been many years since that matched physical res on a stock Mac. Be careful what you wish for. Look no further than Windows, which for several years now has featured UI allowing users to set an arbitrary logical resolution at the system level - maybe even an accurate one. Who messes with this? More telling is that MS labels the 120ppi notch on the scale "Large fonts", and the 96ppi one "small fonts". In other words, they encourage manipulation of the logical ppi as a means of magnifying/shrinking things with physically specified sizes on screen, not as a means of achieving WYSIWYG.

The reason MacIE5, and then Mozilla adapted 96ppi was as a defense against clueless (Windows) authors who use point units in their CSS (or just saved Word as HTML), never considering that this might result in text rasterizing into illegibly few pixels in other environments (including other Windows environments). Mac authors are guilty in the opposite direction, of using points in CSS and complaining that Windows makes it look too big. The choice of unit is the problem. The rendering on any platform is unlikely to be accurate, and it wouldn't necessarily be any more legible if it were.

Sticking with a 96ppi x-platform default mitigates the damage inherent in using print-specific units for screen design. Best of all to avoid these units in the first place. Unless/until displays approach print resolution, pixels get at what people really see and care about, whether they prefer to speak of the abstraction of points or not.

Amen, brother Todd.

Todd Fahrner knows as much about these issues as anyone alive and since the mid-1990s has sought ways to bring cross-platform consistency and genuine usability to web UIs. He advises the W3C, The WaSP, and a few lucky designers, of which I am one. He has never steered any of us wrong. Three words: Trust Todd Fahrner.

So, what you are really saying is that all browsers should render 1pt as 96/72px for backward compatible brain death, irrespective of my actual monitor resolution.

If you do that, what exactly is the point of having pt and px as separate units?

What is supposed to happen when I render the same page to a very high resolution display (e.g., a printer)?

Make Text Bigger also needs to make the leading proportionally bigger, like Camino. Otherwise the text becomes unreadable and overlapping.

sheesh jeffrey. i haven't participated in w3c activity since 1999 or so.

P T, what I am really saying is that it is expedient that all browsers shipping in 2003 default to rendering 1pt as 1.333px on screen, in consideration of the fact that a great majority of the people erroneously specifying font sizes in points for the screen media type are using Windows with default settings. As for further damage-control/error-recovery mechanisms related to the use of absolute units for screen display, such as the ability to select another logical ppi, I'm ambivalent. They'd be useful only insofar as you assume continued abuse of absolute units through the widespread deployment of displays with printlike resolution. There's a lot of water yet to flow under that bridge.

As for px and pt becoming redundant, note that the CSS units pt, in, cm, mm, pc are also redundant. So what? Note also that according to CSS-1 (1996) all such absolute units "are only useful when the physical properties of the output medium are known." i.e., never on the Web's screens. It is therefore entirely reasonable that UA implementors adopt a defensive stance when authors ignore this dictum by using pt, and effectively collapse pt to a fixed px (native screen) value.

Printlike output devices, such as, um, printers, should always print 1pt as 1pt. For the time being, note that PDF is better suited to such purposes than markup+CSS.

And when px-speced material is printed or or otherwise output to media in which the eye can't make out the native units, each px should be converted to .75pt, per CSS-2.1.

blind people piss me off...

I might sound stubborn, but as long as Mac OS X has a fixed size for UI elements, I design my pages with CSS using px instead of anything else. People who buy computers with high resolution displays (iBook, PB12", Sony VAIO C1 etc.) have good eyes or sell their computers soon enough.

I'll start to design in pt the moment I can get a 150 ppi or 300 ppi display and my favourite OS & apps supports that (by doubling or quadrupling the size of all/some elements or by scaling on a vector basis).

OT, I know, and a fairly silly question anyway ... but every time I visit the Web Standards Project the icon in Safari changes to a favicon of a wasp, and every time I close the browser the favicon disappears. This doesn't happen with any other site I visit. What's the cause? Is it because they called it "wasp.ico" not "favicon.ico" as people usually do, or what? As I say, silly question - it's just mysteries tickle my curiosity.

Thanks Todd, you've made this very clear and I think I finally understand the issue. I'm still left saddened that browsers that _do_ know the display's resolution have to pretend they do not, but I've been using em's for a while now anyways. Now I understand why.

Two questions:

If I create a stylesheet specifically for print medium, do these rules still hold? Or does a pt mean a point?

Since the browser has to be able to render px at .75pt for print media, couldn't there be an option to treat a display with a known resolution in the same fashion? E.g., on my 108dpi display to scale the output so that 1px is .75/72 inches? Wouldn't I then see the fairest representation of the designer's intent?

Have to concur with the 16px crowd. I tend to design sites with relatively sized text (em's), having browsers that set a different, although preferable default size, is a complete nightmare for me.

Todd, you went too far. You say there's nothing wrong with magnifying or reducing, yet you proclaim it wrong to want "strict WYSIWYG". It is not! I am one who puts a tape measure to his CRT in order to set the resolution to EXACTLY 72ppi. I find the black border around the scanning area very comforting, and it provides extra room for all my Post-It(tm) notes to extend.
I am one who is visually anal; I straighten crooked pictures on the wall, I make sure my clocks are synchronized with the EXACT time, and I NEED my fonts to appear the same height on my screen as they do on paper. It *is* different from watching a movie; you do not do word processing on the silver screen.

If 12pt in Safari is any different than 12pt in Tex-Edit Plus, then I will not use Safari. Period.

-Walter

Er, "different than" = "different from".

Hey, how about a preference like this:

Font handling
. . Screen: (*)W3C rules . ( )Mac rules
. . Print: (*)W3C rules . ( )Mac rules

More user-friendly than dpi/ppi techie stuff, and gets to the gist of things.

-Walter

Amen, brother Todd.

Nevertheless:
As a user :
I use 14 (it's said to be "pt" but now I know it's "px").
I want a density (ppi) setting defaulting to my hardware (4px/mm=101.6ppi on my PB 1280).
I want "px" be a pixel and "pt" be 1/72".
I want consistency in all OSX application measurement and display.

As a (marginal) web designer :
I thought that "px" was bad and "pt" was correct. After reading all this stuff, I now understand that there is no way to design a page that render approximately the same everywhere and is still scalable to the user wish. "em" are like nothing (I mean like html default), relative to "who knows what".

Putting the CSS pt/px discussion aside, which after re-reading I fully understand, what would this mean for normal HTML pages? I've noticed a lot of discussion in here has involved CSS units, CSS sheets, etc., but what about plain old HTML?

When doing cross-browser CSS, it is common to use px sizing, as it renders almost identically across browsers and platforms, and relative sizing in "non-compliant" browsers IE5/Win is a bitch to work with.

However, more and more projects require some degree of usability, and relative sizing of text is one of the very first requirements.

Not having the biggest penetration on the browser market, I would say that going against the "standards initiative" of the larger players would probably be a very bad idea for the Safari project.

Since most users of Safari will rarely see ANY site, that does not define text sizes, I cannot see why Safari should not try to encourage usability, instead of trying to set it's own standard and being ignored by the "usability crowd", for being too difficult to work with.

Admittedly, I have not read all of the 150+ posts, and am not a Mac user.

I am, however, a professional webprogrammer and standards evangelist, who would love to do cross-browser sites that renders nicely in Safari :-)

/Morgan Roderick

The case for 96dpi is very well argued, but I still have to respectfully disagree here. What in hell's name is the point of simply defining a point as "1.33333333 of a pixel"? The reason points exist is to provide a measure that's relative to physical space, not pixels. Those who want to specify pixels ought to use px! In my view, the spec is not unclear about this.

I realize that there is value to not breaking IE-designed sites, but defaulting to 12pts and appropriate ppi (that means, in most cases, the equivalent of 16px) will take care of this for the vast majority of sites. There have been plenty of other discussions where we've agreed it is preferable to respect standards than to continue WinIE breakage for backwards-compatibility. I don't see how this is different. We're only talking about CSS behavior here (the rest is taken care of by having a good default), and if a CSS author is specifying pts instead of px, it's clearly intended to be a logical measurement. The spec wouldn't have included pts if they were meant as just a stand-in for "4/3 times pixels".

"I realize that there is value to not breaking IE-designed sites, but defaulting to 12pts and appropriate ppi (that means, in most cases, the equivalent of 16px) will take care of this for the vast majority of sites."

No, it won't. Many sites (including plenty of sites in the top 100) mix points and pixels on their pages. The only way those sites will look the way the designer intended is if the ratio of points to pixels for screen display is well-defined.

I can even give you a hilarious example from a real-world top site:

a { font-size: 12px }
a:hover { font-size: 75% }

The site actually wrote code relying on the fact that 75% of the default font size will be 12px. Is this terrible code? Sure, but it works in *every browser but Safari*.

It's also worth noting (and this is data from my Netscape days), that on the order of 90% of users never explicitly adjust a single preference in their Web browser, so the default font size that we pick *will* be used by a vast majority of Safari users.

if there was a version v71 and if i had it, i would say

THANK YOU DAVE

it now works with my school

http://tychousa5.umuc.edu

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

BYE BYE TO NETSCAPE AND IE

That is - IF I had v71

:)

"if a CSS author is specifying pts instead of px, it's clearly intended to be a logical measurement."

Which is fine and dandy until a poor browser author has to decide what to do with a size specified in points when rendering to a computer screen.

Assuming the target audience isn't folks with Macs from the pre-multi-scan monitor era there is no way for the browser or OS to determine the actual size of the display (in any physical units convertable to inches) so the browser author is left with the conundrum of how to fufill a request (render this at 12pt) which they don't have sufficient info to fufill. So they retreat to 1pt = 1.33333px. we all sigh deeply and dream of the days before multi-sync monitors and LCD projectors and all those other demons that destroyed our 72dpi-ruler-to-the-screen-just-like-paper dream world.

I vote for 16px for all the afore-mentioned sensible reasons.

Dave and Todd:

If the two of you would agree, I think it would be extremely helpful if Todd's explanation of px and pt and the history involved were posted to the main Safari blog, sort of like the discussion of tabbed browsing.

On pure Safari notes, I would make sure that it's clear the font size is being specified in px and not pt. I've been swayed by the arguments that the default should be 16, but I'd not only give a preference, but also a DPI preference so that people who want to can customize it to be *exactly* what they want. The earlier suggestions of showing a preview of text sizes of ruler were good ones.

Something completely off topic - please make it so when the tab bar appears the window does *not* resize. Otherwise, I launch the program and the window is (for example) 600 pixels tall. I open some tabs (which look to be 15 pixels tall or so), and eventually quit. Now when I relaunch Safari, the window is 615 pixels tall. This continues until it's the height of the screen. :( Adding the tab strip should alter the height of the viewing area, not the window. Or even better, allow the user to save the default window size, ala OmniWeb (although they might not like it if you do that). Thanks for reading the off-topic post!

Another off-topic that I just noticed, and shows that Apple's incredible attention to detail is still there. Most sites have really long titles, like "MacNN | The Macintosh News Network". When I bookmark sites, I usually shorten them to the important stuff - "MacNN" in this case. Well, if you load a bookmarked site in a tab, it uses the bookmark title in the tab, not the web site's "Title" attribute. To see how useful this is, compare these two (large) examples in Camino and Safari:

Camino - what comics do I have open???
http://homepage.mac.com/jochs/Camino.jpg

Safari - aahhhhh, much nicer!
http://homepage.mac.com/jochs/Safari.jpg

Personally, I always reduce this to 12, so I dn;t like 16 (too big!) or 14. But as others have said, as long as its configurable, why does it really matter what the default is?

Personally, whichever you choose, 14 or 16, I'll still knock it down to 12pt. Despite being 52 with sight that's not as good as it used to be, 12 point is fine for most uses. I do keet the larger/smaller font buttons on the toolbar and occassionally increase or decrease the font size. I do both with about equal frequency.

JimB.

Apologies if this has been mentioned in the previous 178 comments, but why not present the user with a 'Choose default font size...' dialog upon install/first run? It'd be less annoying than 'Make Safari your default browser?'.

For the sake of accessibility to users that can only see large fonts, please use 16 px as the standard.

This will allow designers to specify font-size, in a stylesheet, using percentage rather than exact pixels. Unfortunately, if designers specify exact pixel size for a font in a stylsheet, IE for Windows will not allow visitors to the site to enlarge the font size.

If Safari has a different standard for font-size from IE, web-designers that make their sites accessible, will not be able to have a uniform look on Safari and IE.

Hyatt, you tell us that the default value in Safri is 14 pixels. But the font-picker shows us 14 *points* (see the preview pane). Can this be fixed ?

As a Web designer, I find it extremely irritating that Safari offers 14px default font size. Sure, many Web designers set specific pixel sizes, but some of us try to offer relative sizes for accessibility, and Safari then ends up renderring these smaller than almost everything else. The upshot is that while Safari is good for general browsing, I have to use something else for development, even though Safari's standards support is rapidly rivalling even Gecko. PLEASE change it to 16px; if people want 14px, then maybe give them the option to change it back in the prefs. Leave it at 14px and Safari will _never_ become a serious choice for developers, which would be a massive shame.

As a web surfer, I like very much the 14px default size of Safari, simply because it is the best text size my 800x600 screen. As a user, I don't care if the design is rendered exactly the way the designer intended, I just want the content to be accessible... and readable at the size I want, and by the way: 16px is too big on my screen!

As a web designer, I build my sites so that they looks as good with content at 12px, 14px, 16px or 18px. As a web designer, I respect the user choice in the preferences regarding the font size and if the user choose 14px, the main text is 14px. Not convinced? Look at my web site, and try the +/- buttons, or change the default text size. Whatever the text size, you will be happy.
http://michelf.webhop.org/home.html

The real problem is that many designers make the main text smaller that the default size so that it fit their preferences. Sadly, this happens a lot.

(by the way, my site expose a minor bug in Safari v60: change the text size using the toolbars buttons and the first letter on the page (the one in the floating box) won't be resized)

I found Todd's comments mostly plausible, but the fact remains that if we all stopped being "clueless" and embraced pixels as The One True Unit, our web sites would get harder to read every time display technology improved (and produce unpredictable results when printed on different devices). This strikes me as a goal to be avoided, not pursued.

What next, browsers that check the last modification date and apply a font-scaling ratio based on demographic data about monitor ppi in that era?

-j

It seems a lot of the comments posted thus far are personal preference, which is not (in my opinion) the issue at hand here. If a user wants to change the default font size setting, it should be easy to do so (in that regard, placing the -/+ buttons in the tool bar by default would be a terrific idea), however, a user's personal preference should not necessarily be taken into account for the default setting.

From a developer's point of view, I agree that adopting the "standard" used by other major browsers on the Mac OS and other platforms is a good idea. It makes life much easier for web developers, since we can rest assured that we will not have to create a separate set of CSS font rules just to accomodate Safari users. Also, since many Mac-based web developers are likely to use Safari as their primary browser, having the output mimic that of the other target browsers we develop for is a very useful feature.

From a user's point of view, I have to view many sites every day which are developed on other platforms, and a high percentage of those sites are built with a certain target font size in mind. Hence the number of comments regarding very small text on certain sites built with PC users in mind (read: WinIE). I applaud your team's current efforts to mimic many of the functioning behaviors of WinIE, since it would be naive of anyone to ignor the strong hold WinIE has on the worldwide browser market. Many PC developers will never specifically target Safari, or any other Mac browser, and others are not likely to go out of their way to test a site on Safari to make sure it is usable, legible, readable, etc., so a strong case can be built in favor of making the Mac/Safari browsing experience as good as possible by reducing the number of rendering differences between WinIE and Safari.

Safari is already my browser of choice (except for a few of my firm's sites that still have rendering problems *only* on Safari -- see http://evergladesgateway.com/ for a recent example) but there is always room for improvement, and improving the overall user *and* developer experience is the way to make Safari not just the best Mac browser, but the best browser on *any* platform.

I have no problem with the default size being 16px - I just would prefer that it be defined in points as 12pt, with a default PPI of 96. There should be a ruler-style user preference for PPI, for those who actually want the points to work right (and the 90% who don't care will have the default which is fine). As one commenter said, if we all used px, then every time display resolution improved our type would keep shrinking. (in my opinion, a good designer just uses relatives and lets the user's default stand, not that anyone asked me.)

And BTW Todd's interface for font settings is great!

Why, oh! why can't we all just get along ??? Why not all settle on the same ground and then let the users decide if the default font size (whether it's 14 or 16px) is okay with them ? Nobody cares about that stuff except for us designers... It shouldn't (and doesn't) make any difference when you fully embrace the flexibility of the Web, but while we're at it, why not just get everyone on the same level ?

14 is preferable. If some people want it bigger they can change it. But, there is no reason to alter the default.

J Greely, CSS calls for pixels to be scaled to a certain degree of visual angle (=1.333pt at arm's length) when output to devices with very different physical resolution or typical viewing distance than typical [e.g., 1995 desktop CRT] displays. (These are not your dad's pixels; I've joked that they should be called Håkons (hk) instead of px to avoid confusion, after CSS's co-inventor Håkon Lie.) Pixel scaling has already happened for a long time, without the benefit of normative parameters, if you think about, e.g., HTML image sizing and table styling attributes given in pixels, which, when output to printers, come to mean something very different than "the atomic unit of this here display device". So the forward-looking problem you cite is already addressed. In the ancient prefs UI sketch I referred to earlier (http://tinyurl.com/9gdc), the "pixel object scaling threshold" determines the point at which this should occur onscreen. Yeah, it's sorta obscure.

Many other commentators in this thread confuse the question at hand with that of best practice in Web authoring regarding font sizing. Whether Safari asks its users for 12, 14, or 16 px or pt or whatever is distinct from the question of whether ems, px, keywords or whatever are best in Web content. I do find it ironic, however, that those most adamantly against 14px as a user setting cite the difficulties it can lead to with using "accessible" units like ems or percentages in Web content. It's OK for users to override font size as long as they only scale up? Big text can be an accessibility hazard too. I use a 14px default on my 118ppi display because bigger text leads to more scrolling and attendant rsi. IMO, authors concerned about assuring that text remains scalable but still above the legibility threshold regardless of UA settings should look into the font size keywords harder: http://tinyurl.com/9gd1 , http://tinyurl.com/9gd2 .

As for the "evil" of setting text smaller than the user's default, it's not so simple: http://tinyurl.com/9g9c.

Finally, note that the +/- buttons do not intersect the font size prefs UI functionally. The +/- buttons are a temporary override of all units applied to text (I wish option-clicking would scale everything a la opera), and the scope of the change is limited to the current window.

So what you're saying is that "CSS pixels" are not pixels, but a more-or-less resolution-independent unit of measure that happens to have a misleading name. If that's the case, why are we clueless for using points, which is a resolution-independent unit of measure that doesn't contribute to the confusion? There's something missing here.

I've yet to see a browser that uses this auto-scaling of "CSS pixels" on the screen, particularly for height and width in IMG tags, but obviously I knew it was happening on printouts. I can, after all, read what comes out of my 1200-dpi laser printer. :-)

As for the +/- buttons, I'd be a lot happier if they scaled entire pages instead of just the text fields; far too many valid page designs become unreadable if the only thing that gets bigger or smaller is the font. I'd be positively ecstatic if they all scaled the line-height correctly when they scaled the text size; Safari isn't the only one that only scales line-height in certain units. And width; pleasepleaseplease scale width consistently, regardless of the unit it's specified in.

You know what I'd really like to see done to solve this problem? A browser preference screen that draws half a dozen lines on the screen and asks you to select the one that's closest to one inch in length. Suddenly points are points, inches are inches, and pixels can be deprecated. Heck, this would even work with WebTV boxes and PDAs, two other places where the common assumption about the nature of "CSS pixels" break down.

-j

Todd said:
Finally, note that the +/- buttons do not intersect the font size prefs UI functionally. The +/- buttons are a temporary override of all units applied to text (I wish option-clicking would scale everything a la opera), and the scope of the change is limited to the current window.

I heartily agree.

I'd have to think about it, but I also would consider a right click (ctrl-click) menu that allowed you to save and apply previous settings (scale page 110%, scale fonts 120%, reset to default)

" So what you're saying is that "CSS pixels" are not pixels,
" but a more-or-less resolution-independent unit of
" measure that happens to have a misleading name. If
" that's the case, why are we clueless for using points,
" which is a resolution-independent unit of measure
" that doesn't contribute to the confusion?

Because trying to handle resolution-independent measures for text accurately across a wide variety of very low (screen) resolutions creates more problems than it solves. A couple of decades of legacy attempts to do just this has thoroughly contaminated the space at the OS level, engendering the need for a new, reality-compensated kind of unit that, gee, happens to act just like pixels have in HTML display/print scenarios for about a decade now (advent of IMG tag in Mosaic).

"Hinting" built in to fonts is the most heroic attempt to deal with the varying-resolution problem, but it doesn't go nearly far enough, as the line-layout metrics are still considered inviolate in order to preserve "page fidelity" - sort of a baseline print requirement that the Web's typically more flexible/sloppy display priorities aren't burdened with.

> You know what I'd really like to see done to solve this
> problem? A browser preference screen that draws half
> a dozen lines on the screen and asks you to select the
> one that's closest to one inch in length.

Again, this assumes that "accuracy" is the problem, and that if only all systems knew how many pixels fit into an inch, we'd be out of the mess. It's not. The illegible text here: http://tinyurl.com/9gi6 was *not* smaller than the specified 7pt on the display I grabbed it from in 1997; it's that at 72ppi, pretty nearly all roman text will be illegible below 9pt.

"Because trying to handle resolution-independent measures for text accurately across a wide variety of very low (screen) resolutions creates more problems than it solves."

Sorry, could you write that again in a larger font? It doesn't make sense at the current size. All you've done is convince me that current browsers suck for every unit except "em", and that we should expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. Not the cheeriest of thoughts.

As for the sample page you reference, bad design is bad design, no matter the unit. I can find unreadably small text specified in "px", "em", "pt", and probably "cm" if I look hard enough; it's one of the reasons I keep Mozilla's "minimum font size" preference set at 13 (and wish that there were a "scale entire page if moron specs type at sizes below X" preference available, along with "automatically send hate-mail to idiot who sets body text on a line more than X em wide").

You're right that simply being able to accurately measure the size of a pixel isn't enough; we also need more web designers who care about readability.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go take refuge in my copy of Bringhurst.

-j

All this has already been settled in v75....14 point wins!

Don't take refuge too long, JG. You are not the first person I've met who, upon realizing the depth of the mess that is Web typography, recoils in horror back to print. Spiekermann a couple of years ago, upon looking into some aspect of CSS, blurted out something like "you people need need to leave typography to the experts", and that was the end of the, um, consultation. How many copies of Bringhurst, Tschichold et al have *you* given to your local CSS committee member, implementor, etc?

Ah, but I'm not running away; I'm fighting back by specifying all my web pages in picas, points, ems and inches (with proper stylesheets for printing, where there's no excuse for screwing up these units). If I could get the SVG plug-ins to reliably do something sensible when height and width are specified in typographic units (and if Adobe would be kind enough to make the background transparent), I'd never write "px" again. (although I'd continue to let a Perl script insert them on my photo-gallery overview pages, as a hint to speed up table layout)

As for witnessing to the poor benighted unbelievers (or is that unreaders?), I must sadly report that the only browser developers I have decent access to are stuck in maintenance mode on a product that will never rise again in its current form. All our standards people, if it's right to call them that, are hundreds of miles away, as is the group building the product that will likely replace ours.

Spiekermann was right to say what he did (although he was a bit mellower in the new edition of Stop Stealing Sheep); we've spent thousands of years figuring out how to make text readable, and it only took a few weeks for us to figure out how to ban it from the Internet. :-)

-j

ah bringhurst. pure typographic extacy. i have it sitting here on my night stand.

"All this has already been settled in v75....14 point wins!"

Er, the default is always 14 points. We're talking about px here. That's irrelevant. :)

Cool! Safari Beta 2 is out (v73)! Keep on the good work!

16pt windows = 14pt mac

I don't know if this is the appropriate forum to suggest this feature, but here is what I'd like to see (and I don't think this exists in any other browsers). I absolutely hate and despise it when clicking on a link opens a new browser window! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Could a preference be added to Safari so that the user can set Safari up this way? I'd like to be able to click on one of these links and set Safari to override the "open in new window" directive of the page's code and open it in a new tab. Some web sites are notorious for spawning multiple windows, and if I could force them to open in a new tab instead of a new window, that would be wonderful. Often, simply clicking on a button opens a new window! (just like the one I'm typing in right now) Ugh.

16 pt Windows != 14 pt Mac if you're using the same dpi as Windows. Therefore, the default in Safari should be 16 pt.

It basically comes down to this - what is the point in spending days, weeks or even months getting Safari to render web pages correctly if you're going to ruin it all in a flash by not using the same default font size as Windows IE?

Oh, and I know this is probably not the right place to post this, but can something please, please, please be done about Safari's dodgy window positioning algorithms?

Lots and lots of people browse with their browser window filling the screen, and so for new windows to cascade off the right-hand side of the screen - so that the scroll bar isn't visible - is just the most horrific thing ever.

For a window with an obscured scroll bar to then be remembered by Safari as the default window position for new windows (even though it was never manually positioned there) then makes the problem 10 times more annoying.

I realise that Cocoa's default behaviour doesn't make this easy, but you'll just have to hard-code it guys. The developers of Carbon browsers like IE obviously had to anyway!

IE's window positioning is not any better. New windows should open directly on top of the previous window, which is not the case in either browser. Ah well, it doesn't matter anymore because Apple released v73 this morning :D Thanks Dave! (Though it probably wasn't your decision.)

Side note: can anyone explain to me why my valid CSS/XHTML produces that orange bar between my header & my content in Safari and Opera (Win) ?

Web pages also contain IMAGES which are rendered as pixels. I think the relative size of graphics and text should be preserved.

So, forget about dpi for browsers, use the de-facto 16px standard.

can some explain what has happened to the letterspacing of numbers when rendered below 12px? or all caps for that matter? any ideas? todd? hyatt?

Hi, I keep reporthing this problem (and ones like it) through the bug icon on safari... but it's still not fixed in beta 2... So here I'll give it to you...

http://homepage.mac.com/sixcolors/NWE/

The max-width and min-width tags on the parent div for the 'menu' are ignored... IE ignores them too, but I expect IE to not work... However they work great in Gecko and Opera....

Can't you just do a sit-in at the OSX development building and make them give you a resolution-independent display model so we don't have to worry about this silliness? We could even take advantage of our high-res screens without using magnifying glasses. Imagine.

I have downloaded the 2nd beta of Safari...and I'm still having problems with some of my complex web pages that work perfectly in Win IE, Netscape 7, Mozilla 1.3, etc.

Is it dirty coding on my part or a bug in Safari? Hard for me to tell. Can't we PLEASE get some kind of Javascript console so developers can tell what is going on with our pages?!!?

Quinn Perkins

Just downloaded beta 2. I'm glad we finally have a new public beta to test. I've only given it 15 minutes but my initial thoughts are:

- Auto Fill is nice. It didn't autofill the URL field on this comments form, even though I have my URL in my contacts entry.
- Java applets that didn't load before (due to cookie issues?) now load. However, stability seems to be an issue. I had 2 crashes in 15 minutes. I'll do more testing before I file a bug.
- Reset Safari feature didn't reset the URL typeahead buffer from the Address Bar. It seems like it should have.
- Tabs are very nice, thank you.

"Can't you just do a sit-in at the OSX development building and make them give you a resolution-independent display model so we don't have to worry about this silliness? "

Quartz IS resolution independent. Bitmap graphics are not, however.

Are there any google Safari forums? The Apple one is weak. My question is off-topic but I can't find anywhere else to ask it.

Is it possible to modify the Google box to search, say, Yahoo? I'd expect this to be a simple edit of a config or .plist file but cannot find anything.

Also, feature request: extend search box to be able to search user-configurable sites such as eBay, dictionary.com, IMDB, etc.

While I'm grateful for beta 2, my single biggest UI complaint isn't fixed. You still can't tab to controls like buttons and dropdown lists. This isn't accessible and makes filling out forms painful. Autofill is a nice help, but correct keyboard access that honours the system preference is a must.

Mike,

An excellent point! It would be so nice to tab to controls.

I vote for 16px. The fewer inconsistencies between browsers, the better for me.

Leave it at 14px. Create an ad campaign around it suggesting that 14px is easier and more stable, and that everyone should "switch".

C

You know, I just realized that as far as Safari's prefs go, Lucida Grande 14 is about the same size as Times New Roman 16.

Dave, it sounds like you've answered your own question, or perhaps you already had an answer in mind when you started this discussion.

The problem is that there are popular sites that just won't look right if the default font size is something other than 16px; this is obvious when looking at your example:

a { font-size: 12px }
a:hover { font-size: 75% }

Although it's easy to blame the web developer for writing bad CSS, most Safari users won't know and won't care, and will blame the browser instead. To provide the best browsing experience, Safari *by default* should do its best to render pages like all other browsers.

Also, ditto on the off-topic comment about changing window sizes when the tab/status bar are turned on & off -- please don't do this.

Windows is the root to the problem. Take a look at:
http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-467.html#lnk3

The Windows interface in general is very clumsy, with text tags and lettering being much too large for it's own good.

It's a Mac browser for crying out loud - make i look good on a Mac! : )

What would be nice is if I specified that I wanted text to be, say 14 points, then on my screen it was 4.9 mm from the bottom of the tail of the y to the top of a letter T. But, rationality has been thrown to the wind and physical dimensions no longer have any meaning on computer displays.

We are approaching a factor of two difference in how big a so-called 14-point letter appears on various displays. We've got 15-inch CRT iMac 800x600 displays at (wysiwyg) 72 pixels per inch and 1600x1200 15-inch laptops at 133 pixels per inch. Who does it help to say the default font size is "16 points" when it will be an cartoonish 5.6 mm on the iMac and an inscrutable 3 mm on the laptop?

The most helpful response is to accept the situation and do away with the concept of a default font size all together. It does not help and only adds to the confusion. Enforce the use of the +/- buttons to adjust the baseline font size to suit the eye.

Unfortunately, bad web designers muck up the system by specifying absolute, rather than relative, font sizes. As if they know my screen resolution.

Eric, this is again the fallacy of "inaccuracy". You say "We are approaching a factor of two difference in how big a so-called 14-point letter appears on various displays." That may be true, but it's only a minor axis of the problem. The major axis is that a genuine 14pt letter (measure it!) may be represented on some displays with, say, 28 pixels, others with 20, others with 14, others 8, and the jumbotron at the stadium may represent it with one pixel, because its pixels are each 14pt square. Each of these metrically accurate renderings may appear to be in an entirely different font, too, screwing up another layer of things.

Probably the jumbotron operators have wisely given up on treating print (i.e., absolute, physical) measures seriously. So, IMO should everybody addressing a screen with a resolution below, say, 150ppi.

And won't the letter accurately projected at 14pt onto the lens of your eyeglasses look to you about as big as a house?

That's the brilliance of CSS's so-called pixel: it's defined as a degree of visual angle instead of as a length, making it far more meaningfully "resolution independent" than absolute measures.

exhibit: http://style.cleverchimp.com/junk/sizes.gif - the problem with these tortured forms is *not* that they are "the wrong size".

Eric, setting aside the fact that "14pt" has never meant "4.9 mm from the bottom of the tail of the y to the top of a letter T" (and thank Ghod for that!), your argument leaves only "em" and "%" as valid units for specifying font size, line height, and text width. Unfortunately, that still wouldn't solve the problem, because the +/- buttons are only scaling the text, not the graphical elements; the more that people are encouraged to use +/-, the harder it will be to read many web sites.

While I'm ranting, I should mention the thing I hate about "em" units: they're too darn coarse. Most web designers are unlikely to write "0.92em text on a 1.08em line-height"; instead they'll make their headline 1.2em, their small text 0.7em, etc. Most of them will ignore line-height completely, especially when setting text on extremely long lines.

If everything should be done in relative units (and, of course, I continue to disagree), I'd push for "%". Think of it as an "emth". :-)

The day I can drag a window from my laptop's 12" 1024x768 monitor onto my 64-inch 150dpi flat screen and have the text remain the same physical size, I will die a happy man. The sad thing is that the information necessary to make this happen is already known to the OS (both Windows and Mac).

-j

"That's the brilliance of CSS's so-called pixel: it's defined as a degree of visual angle instead of as a length"

Todd, I can't find a current browser that actually implements this definition for on-screen display. They all seem to treat "px" as "screen pixels". This undermines my faith in it as the unit of choice.

Ironically, it may be WebTV that comes the closest to implementing this vision. :-)

-j

Personally, I find the 14px size too big and always immediately set any install of Safari to 12px. It seems similar to the problem I notice with IE, where IE defaults to 16pt/96dpi, yet most web developers mistakenly use points to describe type size, instead of pixels, so their websites display obnoxiously large. I remedy this by switching IE to 12pt/72dpi. I've found that sites that use pixels instead of points look identical at either setting.

If you are in a quandry about switching the default from 14px to 16px, I suggest leaving it at 14px, although, of course, I'd rather it be at 12px!

When I was a teenager, I thought 12pt is way to big. Now I'm going towards 30 and I find myself using 14pt type.

My parents have a hard time reading anything below 16pt. So, if people above 30 are important for Safari, keep 16pt as default. And please: Make a minimum-font-size option in the prefs.

I read somewhere that the default size should be 16px @ 96 dpi (12pt). Personally I use these calculations in my CSS to get the approximate size I want (e.g 0.8333em for 10pt) and let the 'system' figure out want the screen (pixel) size should. However if I'm trying to compare sizes to an image and i want them to be the same height for instance then i assume the standard pixel size is 16px and figure out the em value from there.

Over 30? Oh boy. I'm almost 44, do not wear any "optical aids", and I prefer 12px proportional and 9px fixed-width fonts.

-boo

I have a friend who lustfully pursues the largest pixel-count he can get in a display, so he can fill it with tiny little fonts. I, on the other hand, will only accept multi-megapixel displays if I can increase the font size considerably. My Holy Grail remains the old 19-inch monochrome Sun monitors, used without a window system.

Unfortunately, what happens when I increase the default font size is that things break. Fields that are supposed to be long enough for, say, a credit card number, are suddenly too short. Columns are too narrow. Pop-up windows are too small to hold their contents. Even non-browser windows start breaking (more often under MS Windows, but it still happens on Mac OS X). All due to bad design, but I haven't found a way to avoid every designer whose work disagrees with me.

Looked at this way, it doesn't really matter to me if Safari uses 14px instead of 16px; once I override the default, a lot of sites will be broken for me anyway.

Most desired Safari option: "remember zoom setting for this page/site/domain".

[oh, and it looks like the new beta scales line-height in all units; thank you]

-j

Dave 14 works great as a default. Going larger starts to eat up screen real estate and defaults are all about working on a wide variety of screen sizes from install. Keep up the good work by the way.

Is it my imagination or is Safari actually ignoring the size specified for "body" in stylesheets? Looking at a page that has "font-size" set to 12pt for both "body" and "p", the letters are distinctly smaller within paragraph elements than they are without... looking at the same with Mozilla shows no size difference...

Safari should mke a prefrence option where you can choose between 72dpi and 96dpi display that way everyone will get what they want.

Listen to Zeldman. Safari MUST use 16 as the default size. If it doesn't follow PC IE, it will just resurrect a problem web designers thought had almost gone away. It doesn't matter if it's wrong...Microsoft are not going to fix their "error". If you can't beat them, join them.

Apple uses fixed font sizes on their site, so that looks OK but is not accessible. Anyone who designs using relative sizes gets a shock when they see their site in Safari, even though they are following the standards.

If 16 does not become the default size, I fear we may be stepping backwards into the Netscape 4/IE era of browser detection, which cannot be good for the web.

Surely we don't want that. Make 16 the default. All the 14 campaigners here are morally right, but if the two dominant browsers in the market render fonts at different sizes, I'll wager that web designers (PC and Mac) will start to care about Macs even less.

Mozilla does have minimum font size support. Or at least, version 1.4 that I'm running right now does.

I think removing it from Safari is a bad idea. I've never had problems with sites becoming unreadable due to minimum font size; and now that it's no longer supported, I've already hit several sites where text has been unreadably small.

Switching to a serif font as the default for on-screen text is very silly too.

(I tried to post this as a response to a later entry, but that entry had comments turned off.)

I agree with Daniel and others - the Safari preferences should allow a choice between 72 and 96 dpi and even better, the abillity to set it to any DPI. Let the user decide. Why shouldn't someone with poor eyesight be able to set the brower to open at their prefered readable resolution.