font sizes fixed?

26th Feb 2004

Font sizes are a major headache in my work. Before I started all websites were designed specifically for Internet Explorer ... luckily this trend is changing; however the font-size issue is still a major concern. Dave Shea posted a very useful article on his site about IE CSS deficiencies. He said:

IE is the only modern browser on the market that doesn't allow you to resize pixel-value text. The problem of course, is that we've long known that the px unit is the best way of ensuring cross-browser and cross-platform consistency.So we have a choice: either don't specify a font size at all and wait for the flood of emails from the 95% of the population that doesn't even know they can change that, or break text scaling in Win/IE.

He points to some VERY useful research by Owen Briggs which eventually resulted in a successful conclusion: solve all your font size issues.I'll need to experiment with this on my own site first before trying to roll out any major changes at work ...