Re: line-height: <length> should be revoked

> font-size: 5px; line-height: 1.2em

It seems that I overlooked a key point that there is actually a 
relative unit that inherits as a relative unit.  1.2 means 1.2em
at every level of inheritance.

I'm mainly a consumer of the results of web design and I would personally
suggest that most people using line-height really are putting so much
weight on precise visual appearance that they should be using a presentational
markup language with structrual hinting (e.g. tagged PDF), or, if they
are incapable of identifying structure, a pure presentational language,
like SVG.

My experience of line height started when I analysed the reason for 
pages becoming difficult to read with font sizes disabled in IE, and
I was somewhat misled because the hard copy of the CSS2 specification
I have is actually a draft, which has em, erroneously, in the sample
default sheet - I have a slow connection at home, and also find
that hardcopies are easier to use (pet gripe: pages that get cropped
on the right when you try to print them).  I wasn't expecting a correction
between the draft and released versions in that area.

I would say that allowing lengths in line-height was a mistake, but
one that we will have to live with, because the people now using pixel
line-heights are not going to give them up.

My guess is that the fragment quoted, with the em units, was based on
an old version of the default style sheet and/or a failure to spot the
subtlety about the number domain for line-height values.

Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 03:15:37 UTC