Remember IE 6 and below can't scale pixel based fonts so nothing resizes or scales. Many people are stuck using IE 6 because of corporate standards polices. A lot of our clients are in that situations, on computers locked to IE 6 by the IT dept.
We have some very-high resolution/physical size computers 1400x1050. On a 12" tablet screen. That makes your font size specified in pixels half the print point size aka 10px = 5 pt, 14px = 7 pt. Would you print a book or newspaper in 5-7 pt type and expect people to read all of it? In Firefox on those computer 16-18px is set is the minimum font size (varies by user) so your pages will break anyway, might as well plan for it. That is why I prefer to use ems. Also even in Firefox 3 we have it set to zoom texts only Since I distills what happens to maps when zoomed. Remember the web isn't print and the designee does not control bit only suggests low the visitor sees the page. Every browser can over ride the web designer even it just by turning on "ignore" font sizes and other accessibility settings. Cheryl D Wise http://gawds-org -----Original Message----- From: Ron Koster Sure! Why not?! But then what's the point in studying typography, and art, and aesthetics, and what's the point of trying to do anything with CSS and trying to get things to look good? The point that I was making -- what my question (and frustration) is -- is that as Felix pointed out, things can go screwy if/when one is using more "vague" specifications like 90% of some user's system default of 12pt (or whatever) in comparison to another platform and/or browser. If I specify all my various font sizes in pixels then everything will *proportionally* all be exactly how I want them to look, but if I use percentages then that's simply not the case -- that page that Felix created... http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/Font/font-rounding.html ...shows that issue perfectly. And hey, maybe these "slight" differences don't matter to you or others, but they matter to me. Perhaps I'm just being too picky, though, I don't know -- maybe I've hung around with type (font) designers too long, where it matters if that teeny-tiny serif that one can only see under a microscope is a billionth of a millimeter off. And as a graphic designer/digital artist, too, when I create a piece of artwork it can matter a great deal to me if a single pixel (out of thousands or millions) looks "wrong". In that same regard, when I create a web site (for myself, at least) my desire is not just to create a repository to dump text/information, but to create a work of art, where viewing the text on the page (even if it was pure gibberish, or written in Arabic or Russian characters or something) is also visually pleasing to the eye. If I wanted to specify, say, my list items to be 85.4% of my base font size, then if they end up being 80% instead (because of the issues that Felix points out), well, to me it just wouldn't look right. Hence my frustration... ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
