Basic formatting

A big problem today is that different browsers display formatted web pages slightly (and sometime not so slightly) different. For example, formatting like "font size" and "text color" is treated differently. We are trying to bridge these differences between browsers by compensating for these differences.

Good examples are color names. For example, my favorite color is called 'PAPAYAWHIP' (it's a nice color too ;-). However, this is not one of the named 16 colors in the HTML standard. There are quite common names that are not among these 16 names, such as 'darkblue'. Although most browsers do support more than these 16 names, some browsers don't. For these reasons, all colors are converted into RGB values before being sent to a browser. You are thus able to use your favorite color without having to remember its RGB value.

A more important problem is that of using font sizes. There are big differences in how browsers interpret font sizes. The differences stem from using different screen resolutions (Mac uses 72 DPI, Windows uses 96 or a 120 DPI, etc), and from various bugs in browsers. For example, an 8pt font is rendered in 7.5pt in Navigator 4.x and Opera. Also, some browsers do not support fractional font sizes, and not all font units (e.g. pt, inch, pica, em). With these differences, it is virtually impossible to design a web page with any precision.

FAIRY knows about how different browsers computes fonts sizes on different platforms, and is thus able to compensate for the differences. You may thus rely on getting the exact same size of your text in all browsers and on all platforms.

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