I spoke to @Sarai-WMDE about this this morning, and she mentioned that Codex already has a small option in the scale. I think we just need to spec out which elements take on that style when we implement the new typescale options.

Do we need to change this before new font sizes are live @ovasileva?

Jan and Justin are going to make a list of elements in the page that should have the small font size applied.

After meeting with Justin last week, we catalogued the following elements in Vector that would need a "small" font-size applied to them.

Main namespace

element	description	current size	examples
#siteSub	taglines	14px (was 12.8px)
.mw-indicators	metadata	12.15px (0.875em)
.mw-body-content sup	citations	11.2px (80%)
.mw-parser-output .reflist .references	References	12.6px (100%) <cite>
.mw-editsection a	inline edit links	13px (small)
.mw-footer li	footer	12px (0.75em)

In T350833#9363893, @Jdrewniak wrote:

Main namespace

It's not normally visible in the main namespace, but please also include #contentSub. See for example this screenshot (which has #contentSub outlined). It was one of the things that changed in T346062, and looks/feels a bit too prominent with the normal font-size.

After some investigating, the Design System Team settled on initial values for the small text style of 0.75em with a line-height of 1.5 (translates to 12px/19.2px under 16px).

Like the rest of Codex's typographic scale, this is a work-in-progress style, and we were hoping to test the appropriateness of its values with help from the Web team.

Something to keep in mind: we went for such a small size in order to generate contrast with the default UI and body size of 14px.

In T350833#9363957, @Sarai-WMDE wrote:

After some investigating, the Design System Team settled on initial values for the small text style of 0.75em with a line-height of 1.5 (translates to 12px/19.2px under 16px).

Like the rest of Codex's typographic scale, this is a work-in-progress style, and we were hoping to test the appropriateness of its values with help from the Web team.

Something to keep in mind: we went for such a small size in order to generate contrast with the default UI and body size of 14px.

That linked document appears to say that body text is 16px and that 0.75em is "font-size-x-small", not "font-size-small". Small text should be no smaller than 85% of the body text for accessibility. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility#Font_size for the accessibility guidance provided at en.WP.)

I am confused.

I also agree with @jhsoby above that the size of #contentSub needs to be include. It was the primary motivation for the creation of this ticket.

Hey @Jonesey95! Sorry for the late reply. Answering inline:



That linked document appears to say that body text is 16px and that 0.75em is "font-size-x-small", not "font-size-small".



Correct. Those are design tokens from the Wikimedia design system typographic scale (WIP). The system's scale revolves around the heavily recommended base font size of 16px/1em. That central value is thus represented by the token font-size-medium, below that, 14px is represented by font-size-small and subsequently 12px by font-size-x-small. These are design system variables, and they don’t necessarily have to correspond with the name of the style, semantic labels or CSS keywords. 



Small text should be no smaller than 85% of the body text for accessibility (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility#Font_size for the accessibility guidance provided at en.WP.)



Thanks for sharing that resource! Regardless of the current value of small text in the scale, the teams will make sure that the consolidated size of small text in the context of Vector 2022 will not drop below 85% of the 14px base (12/14 = 0.857). For all other cases, we decided to go for a more universal solution for now (the Codex design system needs to provide unified styles for all Wikimedia projects and environments, beyond EN Wiki) and set that minimum 12px value for UI text in Wikimedia interfaces.

Hello! Could you please advise? :) I have two tasks T348410: 'Property' text size too small on IP info page and T356574: Too small a text size when replying by DiscussionTools, are they part of this one?