[thelist] Confused by 'ems'...

[Colin Strasser]

Jeff Zeldman says that % is unreliable for text: "Netscape 4 for
Mac renders percentage units when they are used for line-height
(leading) but ignores them entirely when they are used to specify
type sizes. And some versions of Netscape 4 for Windows treat
percentages as pixels. (Thus, 200% is dementedly translated as 200
pixels. Mmm, nice layout.)

"Lest we forget, good old IE3 drops the ball by sizing percentages
relative to the user's default font size, rather than to the
parent element. In English: if the web user has set her browser's
default to 10px, IE3 will display STRONG at 20px [even if you've
put BODY {font: 12px} in your style sheet]."

In fact, he argues that the only choices are px or nothing at all.
You can read his entire article about this here:

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear4/index.html

-Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard H. Morris

> > also, they wanted to NOT use the pt or px sizes so that the
text will be
> > scaled according to the size selected by the user.
>
> did you try %?

Don't forget to check for percentages of percentages (of
percentages...)
when specifying % font sizes if they're nested (such as BODY % and
TABLE %,
P %, etc.)