[thelist] percents or pixels?

Lindsay Evans lindsay at redsquare.com.au
Tue Mar 19 16:34:01 CST 2002


> Unpopular suggestion: why *not* use hard pixel sizes? If the stylesheet is
> set to "screen," the typical OS uses pixel-defined fonts in the 10 to 12
> range, and pixels are the native display element of a computer screen, why
> not just hard-size text to 10px or 12px and be done with it?

Because (in a lot of browsers) you cannot make the text larger/smaller when
they are set as pixels, which would seriously piss off a lot of people with
vision problems (ie. me when i've been coding for 12 hours straight :o).

Personally I like em, it sounds like you actually *know* something about
typography ;o)

An aside:
On a large travel site that we launched a year or so ago, we used some fancy
browser detection to serve up separate css for mac & pc, which used em for
font sizing, consequently we got a lot of complaints from users about the
text being too small to read, it turned out that they all had their
browser's font set to 'small', but never noticed because the majority of
sites are using px these days :o/

In the end we stuck a message on the page (12px) that told them how to
change this. Not the perfect solution, but it stopped a lot of thee
complaints.

--
 Lindsay Evans.
 Developer,
 Red Square Productions.

 [p] 8596.4000
 [f] 8596.4001
 [w] www.redsquare.com.au




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