Font size

absolute vs. relative (re-visited... again)

[seashell]

I recently started working out a relative font size scheme on my site as part of my accessibility crusade. I quickly got extremely frustrated at the flakyness of the em. In IE (the majority of my users) 1 em was too big and .8em was perfect. But in the majority of other browsers .8em was too small (IMO). Plus, many of my users are still stuck on NN4 (a whopping 20%!) so I still have to make my pages look decent for them. How could I possibly make everyone happy? I found this reference that helped me out a lot:
[diveintoaccessibility.org ]

Hope this helps anyone with the same problems I had. If there is a problem with this method, please feel free to tear it apart ;).

[bofe]

If you can, don't set font sizes. Most of the time users will already have font sizes set (either via their browser, or via their display settings.

If you can, by all means leave the font sizes alone.

[seashell]

That's why the font sizes are relative. If people want to change them, then they have the means to. If they don't care, then they are displayed the way I want them to.

[XMLMania]

You could always use a server side language to return HTML code for the specific browser.

E.g.

If (browser == MSIE) {
  CSS = <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/IE/style.css" />
}
If (browser == Mozilla/Netscape) {
  CSS = <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/MOZ/style.css" />
}
Else {
//GENERIC CSS//
  CSS = <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/GENERIC/style.css" />
}

[domokun]

why dont you set the font sizes as percentages instead?
you then give the user control over how big they want 100% to be.