Trying to modify font sizing

This is what I’m looking at:

<h3>Flat rate Home Movie 8/S8mm & 16mm Transfers:</h3>
<ul>
	<li><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">8mm film rates based on 3-inch 50 foot rolls</li>
	<li>16mm film rates based on 100 foot rolls</li>
	<li>All Flat Rate 8mm & 16mm Film Transfers include DaVinci Bestlight level/color correction and use of our Wetgate System.</span></li>
		</ul>
<p></p>

The guy who originally did this used forms/cells, it’s a Wordpress site, but since he did it this way there’s no “editor” or simply way that I can figure out to increase font size. I’m tasked with “making the text bigger” and cannot figure this out.

Where it says “span style” I’ve increased the font size px amount, but it only affects the first line. The whole webpage has cells with lists and I’m attempting to make all the text larger, but don’t really know what I’m doing. Any help is much appreciated.

why would you use span? you can just add the style attribute on the <ul> tag

even if you want to use span, span should be like this:

<ul>
   <span>
      <li>

by nesting the span within the list element (li), the span is closed within the list tag as well.

so get rid of “span” and just have it say “style” then the font size should apply to everything until < /ul >?

or nest your <span> properly, but i don’t see any advantages to using span here. What made you use span?

its important that a child element can’t span multiple parent elements.

I didn’t build the site. I’m just the guy trying to maintain and update things. A little out of my depth but figure it’s an opportunity to learn and build skills. thanks for your input!

How did you land this job then?

I started over 12 years ago as the shipping & receiving manager. a friend of mine worked with me to redesign the website. I’ve maintained a handful of sites for myself (music stuff), basic Wordpress stuff. I became the main project manager and did a lot of audio/video editing on restoration projects. Essentially as long as I was able to keep the site going I was entrusted to be the website guy. Now I’ve moved to Spain to teach English and I’m still doing remote work, including maintaining the site. I’m really just trying to make the text bigger since so many of our clients are old with poor eyesight, but it’s proving quite difficult. My Macbook power supply blew up yesterday, had to hoof it around our little farming town looking for a replacement, can’t believe I actually found one.

Okay, good to know.

did you figure it out to increase the font-size? with wordpress involved (no experience in this matter), it might be more complicated

well I dropped in a <font size="+2"> and everything on the page gets bigger. but the line spacing (line height px ? ) didn’t adjust for it. it affected other cells as well. I’m pretty much a trial and error person, but I figure now is as good a time as any to actually study this stuff and learn it.

For the most part Wordpress will let you edit in HTML, but most users use the built in ‘editor’ which gives you a GUI and doesn’t require any code. My friend who helped re-design this website is a bit more savvy and I think he’s using Gravity Forms or something. when you view the page after pressing “edit page” there’s not really anything in the main Wordpress page editing area.

Down below is an area that says “page option” and a drop down menu with “add items”, you can select things like “column, gallery, content, stunning text”, so most of what I’m working with are either columns or content cells. each one has a little pencil or ‘edit’ button, and inside there is raw HTML.

difficult to say how to solve this, do you really have to use <font>?

mdn says its obsolete:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/font

so what is the proper way to control font directly with HTML? I’m tempted to just redo the page without the cells and whatnot do I need to put <fontsize> ? thanks for the link but it’s not clear what the tag is to control size, or would I simply be able to add a tag like this <size 2>

if it helps the page in questions is www.posthouse.com/pricing

I used the style attribute on <ul> element, that worked fine. So what you want can simple be achieved by css.

do you have a internal or external stylesheet available?

When working with someone else’s code, such as an old site over which you have taken responsibility it is best to,

* backup the page using its creation date in the name
* validate the page for its given DOCTYPE
* repair any and all reported errors and validate again
* backup that page using the current date and doctype in the name
* validate using HTML5 doctype
* repair any and all reported errors and validate again.
* backup that page using the current date and doctype in the name

Then and only then upload to the production site, and for good measure, validate once more from the site.

Aside

To my mind, going back to the <span></span> within the list, UL and OL have only one expected child element, LI. We would never use another element as a child.

HTML is sooo forgiving, it renders what it can and ignores the rest. If you are working with HTML 4.01 then it is already very close to HTML5, with the exception of obsolete elements and attributes. The whole exercise outlined above will raise your own awareness of the difference between old and new, and help you to develop your own wherewithal when it comes to choosing elements to use in a given situation, and what attributes they may have.


Example of creation date in name…

index.html  =>  index_181015.html

This is my approach, at any length.

filename_YYMMDD.extension

To include the doctype that it validates to,

filename_YYMMDD_401.html

These are backup names, not the production name. Keep the original production name on the site else you will end up with broken links.