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RE: CSS Units of Measurement

for

From: Cheryl D. Wise
Date: Feb 19, 2004 8:47AM

My only problem is not with the approach taken but with the 76% of the
user's font size. I really wish people wouldn't take it into their heads to
mess with my font size. It is set the way it is for a reason. I think that
is why most people have the setting they choose.

Of course I disagree with the commonly held perception that the default
sizes are too large. With monitors going to ever higher resolutions on the
same physical size monitor decreasing the font size by a quarter makes many
pages completely unreadable even for those people with more or less "normal"
vision. Having had one of the 15" 1400x1050 LCDs and 20/25 vision I found
myself needing to increase text sizes far more than I should. Then again in
most cases I simply went to the next site Google found instead.

Cheryl D. Wise
Certified Professional Web Developer
MS-MVP-FrontPage
www.wiserways.com
mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED>
713.353.0139 Office

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Beadle

Fair enough. As Owen Briggs points out (someone else pointed to The Noodle
Incident), if you set a percentage size on the body element, you can then
use ems in a safer way. That's now his preferred method:

"Anyhow, I played about and found you can make a nice ems stylesheet with P
text at 1.0 em, and then downsize the whole thing by selecting size in BODY
with %, like 76%. It's simple, easy to change, and works for everything.
Score
1 for late nights and coffee. Enjoy."

http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/typography/index.html

A lot of this stuff is about compromise. We have much better browser support
than we did three or four years ago. Sometimes a little nudge ("hack") is
required to make IE behave. I see no problem in that.


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