Re: [WSG] Setting Up Font Sizes

[Nick Cowie]

Samuel

You wrote:
> body {  font-size .8em; }
> p {  font-size : 90%;
> (adjust per design to get the correct sizes etc)
>}


That is asking for trouble, you really need to watch out for the cascade. Get a p inside a p, an li inside an li or a li inside a p and suddenly instead of being 12px text ( 16px - default font size 16px * 0.8em (80%) *  90% (0.9em) = 11.52px ) it is 10px text (16px * 0.8 * 90% * 90% = 10.37px )

personally it is
body { font-size 76%}
the font size I will be using the great majority of my text. Default text size in all modern browsers is 16px and very few people change it. So 16px * 76% = 12.16px rounds to 12px

p, table, td,  ul, li, a, button { font-size: 1em }
because some browser like to set their own values for certain elements. (and for IE that is in pixels, well that was my recent experience with the button element)

Also initially setting your font-size to  ems can produce tiny text in some versions of IE, don't know which ones, but I have never really tested it.


Nick Cowie
http://nickcowie.com