[thelist] wide-screen monitors and sites

Bill Moseley moseley at hank.org
Sat Feb 10 13:52:53 CST 2007


On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 01:30:10PM -0500, Ben Glassman wrote:
> Setting the font-size of the body element to 62.5% using CSS makes 1em =
> 10px in modern browsers (where 16px is the default size, 16 * 0.625 = 10).
> Thus if you wanted to set the width of your containing element to 760px you
> would set it to 76em. If you use ems for your whole layout, the entire page
> will zoom in and out (minus potentially images) when font size is increased
> or decreased. This doesn't necessarily provide a solution for resolution
> independent layout (the layout in this case will have a width of 760px by
> default) but it doesnt allow the user to increase the entire site's size.

I see this very often.  I don't understand why one needs 1em to equal 10px.
Just so you can use relative sizing and hope it equates to pixels (how
ever big they are)?

Also, if font sizes are not reset on child elements then for some
users your text may be unreadable.  Please, I have my default fonts
set as I like them.


There was the argument that some fonts (Verdana??) always render too
large so using < 100% makes sense when using that font.  Not sure if
that's still recommended or not.

I suspect there's a ton of debate on this just a Google search away.

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org




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