[thelist] Back to font sizes (for the eighty-fifth time)

[Erin Kissane]

So we all know that font tags are bad and style sheets are good, but do we
have anything resembling consensus on how to handle font sizes in CSS?  I'm
stripping font tags from old code and trying to come up with a good CSS
compromise and thus far, I'm undecided.

On the pro-absolute size side, there's the fact that "x-small" and "11px"
produce approximately the right size fonts for IE4+ Win, NN4.x Win, and IE5
Mac.  The user, however, is unable to change the font size for easier
reading, which is a factor since the site's using smallish fonts as
specified by the designers.

On the pro-relative side, ems are wonderful -- but .7em, while lovely on a
PC, is illegible on the Mac.  "Smaller" and "bigger" are fine, but we need
better control over sizes without resorting to kludgy document structure to
get more sizes.

So what are you guys using to get by until the browsers get better?

Erin