[thelist] User Agent Capabilities (was: CSS: Unix and font sizes)

Joe Crawford jcrawford at avencom.com
Mon Apr 16 12:22:25 CDT 2001


Charles F. Johnson wrote:

>>> another way to handle it would be for browsers to support a "baseline" font
>>> size, so the designer could specify the default setting  and scale up and
>>> down without fear of creating unreadable pages.
>> 
>> I believe you just described 'em'.
>> 
>> If you like 10px, and I like 20px as default font, then 1.5em is one thing
>> to you (15px), and another thing to me (30px).
> 
> Exactly -- and that's why it would be nice to be able to specify an
> *absolute* baseline font size. Unfortunately, the way ems work right now,
> the designer has no idea how large (or small) a visitor's fonts will be.

But it seems to me that's the beauty of the *idea* of ems -- that they would
scale according to user preferences, and designers could specify 2x the
user's baseline, or 2/3rd's of the user's baseline, etc. And again
theoretically, if the user could also decide on the *absolute minimum*
readable font size then increments less than 1x of baseline which might  be
unreadable would be nipped in the bud.

We're in the area of pedantry now of course. We don't *actually* get to use
em in this way as has been noted in many articles and discussions recently.

    - Joe <http://artlung.com/>
--
Joe Crawford ||||||||||||||       mailto:jcrawford at avencom.com
||||||||||||||||||||||||             http://www.avencom.com
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