A request to web authors: do way instain "font-size: x-small;"

Do you realize the number of web pages that have the main font size i.e. font for articles smaller than default? It's a pain to my eyes, and I'm sure it is too for other non-machine web surfers.

You may have realized that browsers default to 16px font size. During the VGA days, it was quite big. On a 14" CRT, that would translate to 0.28" or 7mm, while normally printed text has 4mm height. Therefore, it may be acceptable to make fonts appear smaller by applying the above style (in the title).

Not anymore. Though standard monitors grew larger, lest be forgotten that display resolution is also growing. At the moment, standard consumer desktop comes with graphical support for display resolution (note: this is a misnomer) of at least 1000 px vertically. Refer to the formula below for PPI.

PPI is a measure of how fine (computer) images can be drawn. Having larger values means less blocky text and images. The formula shows that PPI grows with display resolution, and decreases with monitor size. Now, over the age, the monitor didn't get considerably any bigger as it would be impractical. The pixel dimension though, more than quadrupled i.e. each axis doubled. Now what does this mean for the font size?

A 4:3 14" monitor is 8.4" vertically, while an SXGA (1280×1024, 5:4) 21" monitor is roughly 13.1". This is 55% increase in vertical size. But, since the pixel dimension also changed from VGA to SXGA (480px→1024px vertical), total height shrinked by 53%! In all, this meant any font on the second monitor would be 73% the original size on the first one. The browser default 16px font will become about 5mm, which is still way above the 4mm par. No problem so far right?

Obsession with font-size: x-small

Onfortunately, most of the text on the web have their styles defined. The particular CSS property that governs text size is the font-size, and authors can select from a preset size like small, medium, large, or they can put in arbitrary values like 16px and so on. By default, the value is medium. But back then, authors find it too big to their liking, so they used values like small, 12px, etc. They didn't have choice; they either had to tell users to set smaller font size, which they won't, or they set the sizes themselves. They went with the latter. To avoid users who already have font size set to small being marooned, authors chose to use arbitrary size. So that's why we see so many sites using 12px as the font size.

The unresolved PPI problem

Actually, display resolution is not a problem unique to web pages. Native applications also do not address the issue well. The move to introduce PPI-aware (or in Microsoft's term, DPI-aware) application has not been embraced well by developers; most of them are still ignorant about the issue. As such, it is considered impractical to set the PPI to correct values system-wide. Therefore, people default to using 96 PPI for all applications, web browser included. And because it was not addressed on the OS level, the problem persists on the internet side. It is also interesting to note that modern browsers use px for font size in user preferences. This is not future-proof; anytime the user upgrades his hardware to enable higher resolution, he will have to change the settings again.

Please stop using x-small

By the time you are reading this, you may have realized that people have started to use high-res monitors. So, I beg all you web authors, please, for the sake of mankind, stop using x-small. small is still acceptable. xx-small is inviting my curse.