Small Beers

According to what I've read, altbier (my glad obsession) is traditionally served in a simple straight sided glass of capcity 200ml, 300ml, or 400ml. By English standards these are small glasses for beer - the UK pint is about 567ml, or 20 fluid ounces - bigger than the US pint, which is 16 ounces (which came about from a divergance when the US adopted the beer gallon as standard while we in the UK adopted the wine gallon... both had 8 pints, but were different sizes!). I now have pretty representative glasses of those altbier sizes. I have to say that the tiny 200ml is great for beer. If you have a draft system at home as I do, you can start with a small one after work - then enjoy a top-up or two with dinner, and eventually loose track by bedtime. I wondered if England always had an insistence on beer coming in pint and half pint sizes, given that our beers were once much stronger - at least the strong ales drunk by the better off were. I found this link about legacy measures. It seems in Australia they have (or had) a whole range of measures down to a fifth of an imperial pint (called a small beer), or a quarter (called a pony). I wonder if this a legacy of an earlier British system, but I can't find any record of it. Old measures link.
Somewhere else I was reading that in olden Germany practially every city had its own measures - many with a pint-like measure around the 400ml mark - so presumably that's where the Alt and Kolsch (Cologne's legacy ale style) glass sizes originate. I'd like to know more - I had some references I appear to have lost but I'll try to include them if I can find them again. For tonight, my small glass is empty and I'm done.