Taking Richard Rutter's original idea to make the base font-size 62.5%,
which translates to 10px on most desktop computers running at the common 96
DPI setting, I suggest a modern alternative. It looks like this:
html { font-size: 125%; }
Georg has a nice write-up explaining the problem with 62.5%--
<http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_1_03_04.html>
Yes, I'm using a nominal 20px for equally easy conversion. But wait, there's
more!
For the majority of text on a page to display at 16px I'd use a font-size of
80% on the BODY element. For 18px I'd use 90%[1].
Today, nearly all browsers understand REM units. They are relative to the
root (HTML) size of (nominal) 20px. Easy-peasy; fewer fractions, and no
problems with cascading percentages.
For the rest--IE 8 and earlier, and Opera Mini, keywords should work well
enough, since you won't get "pixel perfection" on those browsers
anyway--whatever that might mean. IE will re-size text set with keywords,
but not with pixels.
Perhaps this is just nonsense. But it just has to be better than 62.5%. I
use Opera a lot, with a minimum text size of 12px--you'd be surprised how
many sites break because of the scaling due to the 62.5% base size. It's
everywhere! :(
[1] Taking a partial leaf out of Jeffrey Zeldman's blog design here.
--
Cordially,
David
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