> "the average font size has been steadily creeping, maybe 1.5 pts per 5 years."
To be fair, so has the monitor resolution and its density. I'm looking at HN, and imagine, ten years ago, I was using 1280x1024 then, this very font would've physically been a much bigger picture. So in effect, the font-size increase may only counter-measuring the resolution increase...
On most operating systems, this is supposed to be almost irrelevant since they use a "virtual" resolution and DPI that gets used to render apps at a reasonable size across displays.
To be fair, so has the monitor resolution and its density. I'm looking at HN, and imagine, ten years ago, I was using 1280x1024 then, this very font would've physically been a much bigger picture. So in effect, the font-size increase may only counter-measuring the resolution increase...