Re: Specifying font sizes in stylesheets

I would suggest using em, or percentage, rather than points, pixels, or other
measures of size. However, you should be aware that there are some bugs in
old implementations, and some size declarations will not be captured. More
importantly, the actual rendered size of a 9pt font varies tremendously
across platforms - what may look fine on Macintosh may be enormous on Windows
and unreadably small on linux, for example. In general, therefore, I would
suggest staying away from specifying font sizes where possible.

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Sarah Kuehnle wrote:

  I just launched a new version of my website and have several emails
  commenting on font size. I specified the font size in my stylesheet as 9 pt.
  As I'm sure many of you know, when trying to change that size using the
  browser (through View --> Text Size), the user is unable to change the size
  at all.
  
  url: http://www.thedesigngirl.com/
  
  My question is this: What is the best way to specify font sizes in a
  stylesheet so that the user is still able to adjust the size if necessary?
  Should I be using pts, ems, pixels, percentages? Or should I not specify
  size at all and just rely on user defaults?
  
  Thanks in advance,
  Sarah Kuehnle
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 12 June 2000 04:43:41 UTC