267460 - change of font size fails to propagate throughout page

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Rick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041102
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041102

RE: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesonet/getobext.php?wfo=twc&sid=TUS&num=48
The sidebar text on the left, text in and above the table, the disclaimer and
footer do not change size.
It's not just this page.
I'm new to Mozilla and everything else is pretty much default.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Edit, Preferences, Appearance, Fonts
2.Change size to, say, 30
3.Click on OK

Actual Results:  
Some text resizes, but most stays the same.  The text that resizes is:
"City, St" "Get Forecast" "Enter Search Here" "Go"
"Weather Conditions for:
TUCSON INTL AIRPORT, AZ (TUS) Elev 2556 ft."
"Webmaster
National Weather Service
Tucson Weather Forecast Office
520 North Park Ave, Suite 304
Tucson, AZ 85719

Tel: [phone]"

Expected Results:  
All resizable text should have changed size.

A few other pages where this happens:
http://www.dexonline.com/
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
http://www.ups.com/tracking/tracking.html
http://www.blumberg.com/software/hud1/index.html

Comment 1

[Gérard Talbot]

The file
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/images/nwscwi/css/main2.css
uses pt almost everywhere (for 10 classes, td and th selectors, h3 selector,
etc) while the setting in 
Edit, Preferences, Appearance, Fonts
is for default font size (for serif or sans-serif: that's user's choice) as
chosen by the user. Again an nth reason and proof why web authors should "not
specify the font-size in pt, or other absolute length units."
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size#goodpractice
Note that if you use Ctrl++/Ctrl+- or View/Text Zoom/Larger or Smaller, the
change of font size propagates throughout page.

--------

I also checked dexonline.com:
http://image.dexonline.com/regular.css
defines font-size almost everywhere with absolute units (pixels) so such css
declarations are applied to each HTML elements of the page. 

If I set Proportional: Sans Serif 30 pixels and uncheck the checkbox "Allow
documents to use other fonts": the dexonline.com font size in the page will not
 become very large because such preferences only applies to elements with
non-defined font size, non-declared font size.

Bottom line is this: both www.wrh.noaa.gov and dexonline.com pages are not based
on scalable, fluid designs but rather on restrictive, constraining author
requests for font-size.

Mozilla 1.8a5 build 2004110305 under XP Pro SP2 here.

Comment 2

[TheRecon Network People Services]

They are pictures, they are not text! Look at the sorce

Comment 3

[Gérard Talbot]

> They are pictures, they are not text! Look at the sorce
class=yellow applies to text; class=white apply to links. What you say makes no
sense.

View/Use Style/None will disable the stylesheet and then Change size to, say, 30
will increase font size throughout the page because there are no css rules with
defined, rigid, absolute length units applying to text nodes.

Reporter, only file 1 bugreport for a single url.

Resolving as INVALID