Font Size Guidelines?

what do you guys do...

[Emperor]

Hi guys,

I just got Firefox, I'm using it alongside IE6 for programming/testing.

Well, when I have the font size in Firefox to Normal the fonts are freaking huge. I like to keep my IE setting at Smaller.

So what is a good choice for the font-size in my CSS? I think 9pt looks nice (I use Arial) but if people have bad eyes and want to make them larger the browser setting doesn't do anything in IE.

IE doesn't make them smaller/larger if you use pixel sizes also.

So what am I supposed to do? If I don't set the size at all they are really big and look kinda stupid.

Any ideas?

Take care,
Cyrus

[cziffra]

This is one of the most debated topics in CSS. You will probably get a different answer from each person. Personally, I use ems most of the time.

The css-discuss list has a wiki page that has some information on this topic. The page can be found here: [css-discuss.incutio.com ]

[photon]

If you set your initial font size to 100%, that will make the font exactly the size the user wants it to be. As you noted, "Normal" for you seemed huge, so you changed your default to something more to your liking. The designer didn't set it--you did. For someone else, "normal" may not be big enough.

Note that I said to set your initial size to 100%. That is just to establish a baseline. You can then tweak your body, menu, footer, etc., sizes using either ems or %s, which will be proprtional to the baseline.

[vkaryl]

I usually set this in the stylesheet as follows:

html, body {
font-family:"MS Sans Serif", Geneva, sans-serif;
font-size:100%;
font-style:normal;
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
}

That pretty much covers it.... use whatever font-family flavor you prefer....