[Alberg30] font size

Tue Nov 12 15:19:37 PST 2002

> Dave Terrell said:
> 
> I think I am one of the offenders in font size. I checked an my
> font was in HTML. I hope this - 12 point times new roman - is better.
> sorry.

Dave,

It's a difficult problem, and for good reason the tag is 
deprecated in favor of cascading style sheets byt the W3C (World
Wide Web Consortium, the people who set the standards for HTML).

In the vein of more than you probably wanted to know, your latest
message is marked:
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

That means it's an ordinary plain text message with no font information.
The mail reader on the recipient's end uses whatever display settings
are set as default.

A recent message from you has these headers:
> X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 6.0.2
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=_1F43FECF.6706696C"

That means that there are multiple versions of the same message in
the email.  The first version is marked:
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
and is for mailers that don't understand the other version, which is marked:
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Unfortunately, mailers that don't understand HTML messages often don't
understand MIME content types, either, and show you the whole thing as
text.  This is what I'm using at the moment and is why can quote all
this non-message information.  More unfortunately, mailers that do 
understand HTML messages seem to default to using the HTML version
and don't have an option to default to the text version.  I would like
such an option.

Looking at the contents of the HTML portion, we find the document type:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
This says that it should conform to the specification at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/ The "Transitional" designation allows
use of elements that are deprecated. There is also a "Strict" designation
that does not.

<BODY style="MARGIN-TOP: 2px; FONT: 8pt Tahoma; MARGIN-LEFT: 2px">
This says that the text should be 8pt size, which is pretty small.
It doesn't really matter, though, because the text itself is enclosed
in a FONT tag:
great. that would be really helpful and much appreciated.
The FONT tag is described at http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/font.html
and is one of the tags that is not permissible under the "Strict" document
type. This tag could be something like or which
would tell the mail reader to display the text one size smaller or larger
than default. Instead, the tag in the message is saying to display it in the
smallest font the mail reader uses--size 1 from a range of 1 to 7. It's
impossible to know, from the point of view of the sender, what size that
will be on the receivers screen. There's an essay on the problems of the
FONT tag at http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/%7Emudws/font.html

So, what can you do? I don't know how you can control what GroupWise
does. If you can set it, sending plain text messages to the mailing
list is probably the best choice. The line:
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2716.2200" name=GENERATOR>
indicates that GroupWise is probably not generating the HTML, but
is using an operating system call or other Microsoft library call
to generate it.

Cynical people might point out that, as a near monopoly, Microsoft
has a vested interest in reducing interoperability with non-Microsoft
products.  More generous people might quote the old saw, "Never
attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
incompetence."

 - George [cross-posted, again]

-- 
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  George Dinwiddie                             gdinwiddie at alberg30.org
  The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span those hours spent in
  sailing.                                    http://www.Alberg30.org/
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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