I was noticing for some time that some sites have too small fonts (not all 
elements, but several ones!)
Recently CNN changed layout (and many other sites from AOL Time Warner empire 
have now layout/CSS similar to CNN), and I decided to look in details what is 
going wrong.

Reference URLs:
http://money.cnn.com
http://top.list.ru:8005/Rating/Computers-OS/Today/Hosts/1.html

Testcases:
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/small-text-CNN-money.html
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/small-fonts-testcase-TopList-2.html

Screenshots:
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/cnnmoney-Konq22.png
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/cnnmoney-Opera5-Linux.png
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/toplist-Opera-Linux.png
http://htmltests.newmail.ru/test/toplist-Konq22.png

First I thought that CSS rules with font sizes in pixels are guilty here.
Surprisingly, but pixel-sized fonts were displayed ok.

But really guilty constructions are like this:
{ FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica; FONT-SIZE: 70% }
when font-size is specified as %% of containing block's height.

I uploaded screenshots made with recent version of Opera5 for Linux - and 
fonts (these testcases, and sites) are looking ok, *readable*.
Does somebody has any idea what's going wrong?
Is Opera just emulates broken MS IE behavior, or it's something different?
Opera uses the same QT2 as KDE, so I was confused to see so much different 
results.
Can it be that 70% of parnet's font size is calculated *slightly wrong* in 
KHTML?

Oh, yes, system details: XF 4.1, AA-enabled, QT 2.3, KDE 2.2.1, both Arial 
and Verdana TrueType fonts installed. X is running at 96dpi.
There is *no* problems with font sizes on other sites.  
-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/