freeform goodness

Aha! Dave Hyatt explained the Safari 1.0 font situation the other day. Basically, two major things changed between the betas and 1.0. First, the default font was set to be 16-point Times. This matches the default for Internet Explorer for Windows, which is presumably the browser most sites are tested against. Unfortunately, in my opinion (and I’m not alone), 16-point type looks freaking huge on a small monitor. After setting my default font setting to something sane (in my case, Lucida Grande at 14 points), I found that CSS specified xx-small type (found, for example, in my Shoutbox), became an unreadable pile of poo. The enforcement of a minimum font size (9 points) specified in the prerelease versions of Safari was removed in 1.0 final. The reason for this is revealed in the Dave Hyatt’s blog entry — that many sites use small font size spans as spacers. That sounds like a really unreliable way to position layout elements, but I’m no professional designer.

The Safari dev team threw us a bone, however. Mr. Hyatt mentioned that it was still possible to set a minimum font size via a hidden pref. Hidden pref, your ass is mine.

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitMinimumFontSize 9
defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitMinimumFixedFontSize 9

(you need to enter those two lines in the Terminal.)

:: Dave Walker 22:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications/safari]
:: tags: safari

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