Forum Moderators: not2easy
So what's the best, most practical way to go? Ems? Percentages? Do you set a base size for body?
Looking for input from the pros. Thanks.
From there, you can make certain text larger or smaller - such as headers 1.6 em to 1.1em, navigation 1.1 or 1.2 em, footer text 0.6 to 0.8 em, hover pop-up div text ~0.7 em, notice messages 0.8 - 1em, etc. These are just examples of course.
I personally dislike the way people use base their base/body font size as .8 em... you're taking the font size one should assume the user is comfortable with, and then shrinking it by a factor of 25%.
There is very little difference between percentage and ems, but there may be certain reasons why you would want to use one, due to the fact they are affected by cascading differently.
As you probably know, pixels don't resize in Internet Explorer, nor do point/pica/inches/centimeter, which is not good for accessibility. Not only do pixels not resize under IE6, but no matter the browser, pixel base sized text can be too large at small resolutions, and too small at high resolutions. Points have a similar problem, although it can be corrected using DPI correction (which most peopel dont' do though). Depending on the page design, you may want to set the printing style sheet with physical measurements like inches and points though.
One last footnote to keep in mind, as you are probably aware, not all font faces are the same size. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot one can effectively do about it, but if you are sizing containers to fit without line wrapping, you may need to be careful and add a bit extra space.
[edited by: Xapti at 1:50 am (utc) on April 15, 2008]
Per Suzy's suggestion, I am making an ie only stylesheet. I guess I can stick that rule in the ie only sheet, and if so, do I target ie6 only?
Also, does that rule change the H1/H2..etc... headers? Meaning I'll have to manually set those?
