[thelist] css units

shawn allen shawn at alterior.net
Fri Oct 25 15:06:01 CDT 2002


quoth John Snavely:
> What's the standards-friendly way of sizing fonts?
>
> em, ex or px or pt or "small"?

There's really no one "standards-friendly" way, it's more of an
accessibility issue specific to the site you're building. Briefly:

- keywords are scalable, but they don't offer much control.
- Percentages and em are more specific, and work well with eachother.
- ex doesn't get much love from UA's, so I'd advise against it.
- Stay away from px if you care about the majority of your audience
  (IE/win users, again) being able to scale your text.
- Use pt (and in, cm, mm, and pc) only in print media stylesheets.

Check out (and contribute to!) the css-discuss wiki for more:
<http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=FontSize>

--
shawn allen
  e: shawn at alterior.net
  p: 415 577 3961
  im: shawnpallen



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