Joseph n rudy:
here's a tip: do not assign font size don't give them pixels, don't give them ems, don't give them keywords don't set font size at all then have a look at your page in various browsers
Now y'see I've never agreed with this sort of approach. OK it does mean that the visitor has got full control over text resizing if required, but I find the results to be just horrendous when you're trying to work within a theme or feel for your site - the fonts I tend to use (Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, etc. to give the Windows names) tend to look cruddy at the browser-driven paragraphc size (looks to be about 13-14 pixels on my setup) and a lot of the time H1 and H2 are just too big.
Also IE5/Win has got a bloody horrible resizing bug where the differences in each size setting are massive (even worse when using CSS keywords), so things get out of hand when extreme settings are being used in that browser.
The sans-size definition approach does have its place in certain areas, but given improvements in technology on the web today, web design is becoming are more intricate and expansive area, even an artform if you have a look at the CSS Zen Garden. Designers/developers are pushing the boundaries on what we see on the web nowadays and every little aspect of a site's style and theme are wanting to be controlled.
IMO just leaving out font sizes and letting the browser do the rest just because we're guaranteed user-sizable text seems to be an outdated mindset to think in - there's plenty that can be done to get the text we designers/developers want it and still keep things fluid and user-friendly for the end-user.
I've been using a trick to keep EM sizes under control for a while now and it works fantastic for me: in your CSS, declare a rule for the body element and set it's font-size in there to 100%. You can then freely specify EM units for font sizes in other rules without silliness taking over. Example:
body {
font-size: 100%;
}h1 {
font-size: 1.5em;
}p {
font-size: 0.8em;
}Those sort of sizes, I feel, give a nice standard size to work from - it doesn't get too small when the browser uses a smaller setting (who ever uses IE's "smallest" setting anyway? I've never found a study which ever mentions people use it) and still shows nice n chunky on larger settings without being ridiculous or naffing up the design's feel.
The only thing you will need to worry about, as isthe case with CS in general, is that you don't start inheriting font-sizes from different elements - I've had a few minor bugs crop up where I've had a <div> font-size declared at somthing like 0.8em but accidentally had a paragraph inside that <div> declared at 0.7em (just something sightly smaller than I thought was standard for that div) - the bloody text came out microscopic because I was actually declaring 70% of the div's setting which was already 80% of the master page size!
But keep an eye open and it's easy to spot and resolve.
Just some thoughts.
MOU
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