[thelist] CSS Font Size

Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at frogger.kicks-ass.net
Mon Oct 27 00:42:58 CST 2003


On Sunday 2003 October 26 21:00, live4bacon at optonline.net wrote:
> Good Morning,
> Two month Reader first time poster.  I have spent the majority of my
> Sunday looking for an answer to this question and my web crawling has
> left me with only confusion.
>
> What font measurement should I use in my CSS?  px, em, pt, kw???

Unless you are specifying a print stylesheet, em or %. Even for a print 
stylesheet I would be a little nervous about using pt. Units like px 
are only intended for user-side stylesheets, and should *never* be used 
in an author-side stylesheet for the screen.

> I want my pages to be accesible to 4.0 and later browsers,

Which browsers? There are a lot of browsers in use that have not had a 
4.0 version released yet. Not everybody plays the version number 
contest; some developers prefer to actually make a better browser 
instead of dumping builds out there just to bump the version number up.

It would be better to state your goal as "I want my pages to be 
accessible with browsers released within the last X (years|months|
weeks)."

> printing info from the screen is not a concern, I am not really
> concerned about users changing the font size but maybe I should be? 

Yes, you should be. There is no such thing as a "one size fits all" font 
size, especially on screen.

> Currently my <p> tags have  FONT-SIZE 12pt

Bad idea. See above.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn


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