Sizing of <pre> and {@code with current jdk8 css

[Mike Duigou]

I have been working on javadoc for the JDK 8 lambda streams feature and ran across some interesting quirks in the current default javadoc css.

We have been using the construction 

<pre>{@code 
   ...
}</pre>

for block examples. We add the {@code} to the normal <pre> block to avoid having to use html entities within the sample to escape the "&" and "<" characters. This makes the examples easier to read in the original source file.

The formatting of a <pre> block and a <pre>{@code block is slightly different as a result relative sizing and nesting.

The <pre> tag sets the font-size to 1.3em (stylesheet.css, line 31)

The <code> tag (emitted by {@code}) sets the font-size to 1.2em (stylesheet.css, line 55)

When nested the effective size is default * body (76%) * 1.3 (pre) * 1.2 (code). 

It would be nice if {@code} nested inside <pre> didn't increase the size. Using relative sizes is generally going to be weird whenever nesting occurs especially if it can occur in more than one order.

Could <pre> and <code> be made to use the same size? 

Might it be better to use "<pre>{@literal ... " than "<pre>{@code ..." as {@literal doesn't add any styles?

Out of curiosity:

- Why is the default body size 76% of the default text size? The 100% size is supposed the user's comfortable reading size. Other than for "fine print" why would we want to force a size smaller than that?
- An explicit font selection is made for body copy but none is made for code/pre text. Why not? Choosing a code font would allow better matching of the size of the body copy and mono space text. It would appear that for Arial/Courier that a 1.05em ratio is somewhat better than the 1.2em currently used.

Thanks,

Mike