Re: [CSS] Lengths relative to the line height

> Would it be good if there's a unit just like 'em' (where you specify 
> a length relative to the parent element's font size) to specify 

This is wrong.  em refers to the current element except when setting
the font size.

> lengths relative to the parent element's line height?

I can't see any value in this except as a case of a more general 
mechanism to reference the computed value of any length valued property,
and even then I think one is getting into bloat and risks problems
with circularity of reference.

Line height height should almost always be specified relative to the
font size, even more so than font sizes should be specified relative
to other font sizes and ultimately the user's preferred font size.  This
is especially true given the way that accessibility features work on
current browsers.

Whilst I've noticed that specifying absolute values for line heights seems
to be one of this year's design fashions, it interacts badly with using
the ignore author font sizes option in browsers which is necessary to
counter last year's fashion of microscopic font sizes (and the fact that
browsers often clip scaling down of the font to maintain at least a 7 by
5 raster, even without accessibility options).

My current experience is that many pages now display with lines too close
together to read comfortably, even when using an IE medium font size.
In some cases the lines overlap - this happens for the error messages from
one of the Microsoft proxy servers.  IE, which has most of the market,
only locks the font size when one disables author sizes, so a line height
that is not specified in em's will go wrong.

Received on Monday, 29 September 2003 02:28:33 UTC