[thelist] Re: CSS article

Mark Gallagher mark at cyberfuddle.com
Sun Jun 23 01:00:22 CDT 2002


Techwatcher wrote:
>>I'm still in the middle of reading the article but there's
>>a part where she says
>>
>>"If I had a dime for every corporate site that tries to set
>>text size in points..."
>>
>>Is there something wrong with doing this? How should text
>>size be set? In ems?
>
> I have a problem with this, too. Normally, I don't set text sizes at
> all (I come from the "trust your browser" school of Web design). But, I
> like to use CSS to specify that headings (at least through level 3)
> should use the non-serif font family as well as being centered. On the
> connected machine I'm using, that apparently means Universe. Universe
> is WAY too wide and big. So, I specify font sizes in points for the
> headings (I use 18, 14, 12 for levels 1, 2, 3 respectively). Does
> anyone have a better solution? Some simple, elegant way to display
> decent headings without forcing a font download or some other bandwidth-
> clutter?

It's not so much an issue of using fixed font-sizes, although that's
certainly a Bad Thing.

The issue is that points are utterly meaningless on-screen.  Their
inclusion in CSS is, AIUI, only their for print stylesheets and the
like.  Unfortunately, too many people look at points and think "hmm,
just like in MS-Word" and use points because they're more familiar with
them.

Points don't have any particular size.  It's completely arbitrary,
depending on what the browser and/or OS decides to do with them.

Ems, percentages, and pixels are for screens.  I don't like pixels, but
I have to admit they are a legitimate screen-based font-size unit.
Points are for print.


--
Mark Gallagher
http://cyberfuddle.com/infinitebabble/







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