About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

For instance, Macintosh sites that use CSS to specify font sizes in units of points will renderwith their text enlarged. This is arguably worse than small text because it disturbs the layoutof various page elements. IE provides a command for zooming text in or out—and in version5 it finally works with all text—but this does not completely solve the problem. ManyMac sites use CSS to specify 10-point Geneva as their body font. This is a popular choicebecause Apple hand-tuned the 10-point version to be easily readable on-screen. However, at96 dpi, 10-point Geneva is ugly. You can zoom out one level, but that reduces its size to what9-point Geneva looks like at 72 dpi. This is quite readable, but far too small for extendedreading. In fact, IE’s default resolution will foil nearly all attempts by Web developers to recommendscreen font sizes that are known to look good.The only way a site can recommend an exact font and size is by using CSS to specify it inpixels instead of in points. After I started using IE 5, I modified the ATPM Web site to specify10-pixel Geneva as our base font. On Macs, this gives the desired results with IE 5 as well asIE 4. However, this makes the text unreadably small on Windows and Unix machines—theexact opposite problem. If anyone knows how to win on all platforms, I’d appreciate a headsup9 .Overall, I think it’s incredibly useful that Tasman can render at different resolutions, and Ithink that Microsoft’s on-screen ruler for specifying the rendering resolution is nifty. But Iquestion its choice of 96 dpi as the default resolution. Aside from the above issues, it encouragesWeb developers to think that the Web is a WYSIWYG medium. It’s not. I fear that whenWindows Web developers (in particular) learn that Mac IE 5 defaults to 96 dpi, they will beless likely to test their sites on both platforms. This can only be bad for Mac users, and it willbe even worse for those who use palmtops and Internet appliances that have vastly differentresolutions. Microsoft’s decision—to make Mac IE render like their gold standard—worksOK in practice, but doesn’t feel like the right solution.SpeedBesides standards support and multiple resolutions, Tasman’s main feature is speed. I’mhappy to report that IE 5 is definitely faster than its predecessor. However, much of the speedimprovement is perceived rather than actual: IE 5 waits longer after you click a link to begindisplaying the next page, then does the actual drawing faster. If you switch between twopages with similar table layouts, IE reduces flicker by drawing the new page directly rather9. mailto:mtsai@atpm.comATPM 6.04 ← 94 →Stuff: Internet Explorer 5.0