I’ll bet the average non-tech’y web-surfer doesn’t know that.

“FYI, if you are struggling to do that, you are violating the most basic web standard on the web. Accessibility trumps “looks” every time in the mind of a true web designer.”

I think this depends on who surfs blogs. I wish I had reliable data on this, but if 80% of web visitors were nontechnical visually OK web-surfers who could not be counted on to adjust their browsers and 10% were visually-impaired users who COULD adjust their browsers, common sense would suggest optimizing for the 80%. (I say this as someone who is somewhat visually-imapaired but capable of adjusting my browser)

I have a photo website (pnArt.com) that ASSUMES high-resolution and high bandwidth – I know I’m losing out on many visitors that way but I’m more concerned that my photos look the way I want them to.

Web designers pick a “margin of safety” and go with that. Designing for every browser is unnecessary and time consuming, and they change with each release (again, Microsoft).

We do the best we can to find an “average” and go with that in order to cover the most browsers the best way. There are no hard and fixed rules on this, since browsers keep breaking them.

And, truth be told, few bloggers ever mess with their Themes, especially their fonts. At the most, they want the background color changed or the sidebar on the right or left. They want gizmos added, but few bother with the fonts.

Besides, the issue of fonts is their flexibility. By choosing a base font and then using percentages on all fonts referencing that base font, you create a “relative font” which means if you use Firefox and press the CTRL+Plus or Minus keys, you can make the fonts larger or smaller based upon your particular needs. This makes the design compliant with web standards for accessibility, giving the viewer control over font size, not the designer. Fixed font sizes are bad manners.

FYI, if you are struggling to do that, you are violating the most basic web standard on the web. Accessibility trumps “looks” every time in the mind of a true web designer.

I’m not expecting visitors to compare browsers!!

But if I have a font size that looks good in my blog I want it to look good to all my visitors regardless of their browser. If I have it set so it’s comfortable and readable in Firefox I don’t want people using Internet Explorer to think I’m shouting at them because it looks so huge.

I’ve been comparing canned WP themes using a couple of PC’s and 4 browsers – 2 IE versions and 2 FF versions, all with their default settings. The majority of canned themes have about a 2:1 text size ratio among the 4 browsers, but a few themes are almost exactly the same among the browsers. I wish all theme writers were that careful. Anyway, by exhaustive searching I’ve found a few candidate themes that I can probably adopt with minimal tweaking of the CSS to use my colors and background images.

On the other hand, I have no idea how non-geeks ever blog; I mean, I can’t imagine my mother-in-law or sister ever editing CSS or PHP.

The article on the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress users, that would help you adjust the WordPress Theme of your choice is Playing With Fonts. Then you can stay with whatever Theme you like and only change the fonts.

Trying to work around browsers is a nightmare, so don’t try to “match”. Just get close and it will be fine. Most viewers do not compare your site between browsers. Only you will do that.

Here’s a screenshot of the “WordPress Classic” theme, which uses em’s and %’s, as you say . . .
. . . The size ratio between IE and FF is about 2:1 . Both browsers are set to their default text size settings.

I’m new to WP – is there any SYSTEMATIC way to find a theme that doesn’t have this problem or do most people get a collection of different browser rev’s and just randomly start trying themes until they find one?

Just change your base font options in your style.css of your Theme from whatever they are to 1 em and then make everything else like headings and titles and such a percentage of the base font. It’s very easy to do.

I’ve found that browsers do not agree with font sizes across the board, but I get few complaints about my fonts. They are smaller in Firefox and larger in IE.

The problem I’m having is that different browsers seem to have radically different ideas of what size to display fonts at, even using their default text size settings.

Someone, above, said that [ something ] “is the best you can do, without installing scripts that detect resolutions and resize fonts automatically.” So ARE there any canned themes that do that? If that’s what it takes has someone done it?

( I also blog about gardening and have many visitors “of a certain age” )

Both fixed sizes or low contrast are enough to send me away from a site–permanently. Using a feed reader is fine for current blog posts, but don’t help if following a link to an older post.