Page is a not externally linkable
lucy24 - 11:58 pm on Aug 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
Now then...
:: turning back to previous page ::
Can you change the "16px" setting? It's an odd size for a sans-serif font; it makes the whole box look a little bigger and more emphatic than ordinary type. Is that the intention of this area? It seems redundant if you're also going to put in a heading.
Are you saying that the 16px setting is not big as you would expect it to be? I looked and the default font size for the heading box is 18px, not 16px but the h1 tag, I believe, is not defined in the CSS stylesheet. If this is the size, are you saying that I don’t need to put an h1 tag on my webpage now? Just type the words that I want to put in the heading without using an h1 tag? Or are you thinking that I don’t have to change the size, but that I should put the h1 tag in and use font-size:100%?
It all depends on what the box is meant to do. If it's intended to contain only the primary heading,* then 16pt sans-serif is actually on the small side: only a little bigger than regular body text. If it's meant to contain the heading plus some further text, then that would be fairly emphatic text. But for SEO purposes you'll definitely need explicit <h1> tags. (Bing is always grumbling at me because my secondary pages start with <h2>.) Since there is only one <h1> on a page, it doesn't really matter whether its styling is inline or in the page's stylesheet. But if you have lots of pages, each with an <h1>, you should have a shared external stylesheet that says it once and for all.
* Am I the only person in the world who has an ineradicable mental block on "header" vs. "heading"? I have to look them up every time. <th> is one and <h1> is the other. And, er, <head> is the third.
Font-family and font-size can both be applied to divs. So if it is genuinely impossible for you to use a stylesheet, then you can wrap all your paragraphs in a single div.
Would I style the divs so I wouldn’t have to style every p style tag with font-family and font-size and save on coding in the process? By styling the divs, would all the paragraphs inside of it take the styling specifications of the div?
Exactly. UNLESS-- this is a significant "unless"-- there is a stylesheet somewhere else that gives explicit styles for the paragraph element. But this is best explained if you can point to specifics.
Inline, you could say
<div style = "font-size: medium; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.2;">
But margins above and below paragraphs would have to be set individually on each paragraph. A stylesheet could say
p.nameofpara {margin: .5em auto 0;}
or
div.nameofdiv p {margin: 1em auto;}
The second declaration overrides the first-- not because of position but because it's more specific. "Any paragraph that comes inside <div class = 'nameofdiv'>." Inline styles override everything.
But, again, think carefully about whether you want to force a size or font-family for the body text. Does your template say anything about size of body text? Can you change it? If it has to say something, you can say "font-size: inherit" and it will be just as if you didn't mention a size at all.
I don’t want to force a size or font family for the body text but if I want to change what I see when I start typing in the body text, I think that I would have to make some specifications? If I don’t make any specifications, I am not sure how I would be able to make changes?
The body text in my template has a default of 12px, so if I just start typing in my body text box, it would be Arial 12px. I feel that this is too small so I am trying to figure out what I should do so that I have a larger font-size in my body text. I can change it to another number (e.g. making it 16px in a div using inline CSS). If I say font-size:inherit and just start typing in my body text box, would the text be 12px? If that is the case, should I use a percentage such as 133% for font-size so the text is 16px instead of 12px and not use font-size: inherit?
Can you change the template itself? Or only override it inline? There is one crucial difference between "font-size: medium" and "font-size: 100%". The "medium" version means use the user's own preferred default size, whatever it may happen to be. The percentage version means make it the same size as its parent element. So if you say "font-size: 100%" inside of something that is set to 12px, your added text will continue at 12px.
Microsoft Word is a word processor. Are you talking about an HTML Preview function?
I am copying and pasting the text from the webpage to Microsoft Word the word processor and the text looks larger there (the size that I want it to be) than it does on the webpage. I also looked at it in HTML preview function and the size that the text appears in Microsoft Word is the size that it is appearing in the preview. That is how I want it to appear on my webpage, but at the moment, it isn’t.
HTML Preview always has its own preferences. You may or not be able to change them. I know this one well: Every time there is an upgrade to SubEthaEdit, I have to go find the plist file, hunt down the HTML Preview font-size, and change it from 11 point Lucida Grande back to 15 point Palatino. (I have no idea where it gets the 11pt stuff. It isn't a Webkit default; nothing else uses it.)
Please don't use the HTML <font> property at all, for any reason. It is heavily deprecated and there are always alternatives. This goes double for values like "size='3'" or "large" where the exact proportion is up to the browser. If you use percentages, the proportions will be almost identical everywhere. Sometimes there will be tiny hiccups based on the user's physical setup, but these are most noticeable at very small sizes.
I will switch from using the font tag to using CSS but I have seen the same situation with CSS with regard to the size of the body text being the browser’s default size and not the size that I specified. Maybe this is due to the browser’s default size for text being shown if a specific font size (using CSS or HTML) is mentioned. When you say this goes double, do you mean “The same thing applies for….”? I think that you are saying it is better to use percentages (CSS).
As you see, there are different opinions about <font> ;)
The problem with anything like "size='3'" or "font-size: smaller" is that it is up to the User-Agent (browser or whatever) to decide just how much larger or smaller to go. This in turn depends partly on the age of the browser. Remember when fonts only came in permitted sizes? 7, 9, 12, 14, maybe-but-not-necessarily 16, 18, 24...
Maybe this is due to the browser’s default size for text being shown if a specific font size (using CSS or HTML) is mentioned.
Did you mean "is not mentioned" ? The user's default size will be used
#1 in the entire document, if you don't say anything about font size or if you say something like
body {font-size: 100%;}
or
body {font-size: medium;}
#2 in selected parts of the document, if and only if you say something like
<p style = "font-size: medium"> (inline)
or
p.basic {font-size: medium;} (style sheet)
These will override any intervening size changes.