Relative font sizes SUCK!!!!!!!!

The BBQ Pit
1

In HTML (and CSS specifically) there are two ways you can set font sizes. Fixed height, where you specify pixel sizes and they will be exactly that height, no matter the viewer’s resolution or preferences; or there’s relative height, where you set things so that the user can adjust to suit - particularly good for those who have poor eyesight, or have absurdly high resolution monitor settings.

This would be all fine and dandy if it wasn’t for the fact that both options SUCK SIMIAN ARSE!!!

I like fixed sizes - I love the control it gives me so that the webpages I make are exactly formatted the way I want them to be - I can place text to line up with particular images, or I can make sure my dropdown menus don’t distort.

But of course, that means many users will find it hard to read in some cases, and if they should want to adjust the size even once for clarity, they cannot.

So most designers (well some militant ones anyway) encourage you to use relative sizes instead. In Cascading Style Sheets, there are several options, but the recommended one is called EM, where the measurements you use are based on the size of the letter ‘M’. This is, unfortunately, the most mind-wrenchingly excruciatingly fickle of them all - it makes not a lick of logical sense in comparison to the other options.

For example, in fixed sizes, if you have large text as a heading, then medium text as the main, and then small text as a footer, you can just nest the size declarations and they’ll work independently of each other. BUT if you use EM, they will multiply their declarations together, so by the time you get to your footer text it could be 0.7 times 0.5 instead of just 0.5

FUCKING INSANITY!!!

One minor adjustment to fix one page can totally fuck up your entire site rendering it unreadable, which, call me crazy, seems to me to be the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of what CSS was meant to be useful for.

Where’s the logic and ease of use? Where’s the convenience and usability? Where the fuck is the common sense if you can turn your whole site to complete garbage with a decimal point?

ARRRGGHHH!!!

2

You want to make text line up with images? Use tables. Make sure dropdown menus don’t distort? Use monospace.

The answers are there. Not everybody uses the fonts specified by the latest version of Internet Explorer. Some people may set all fonts to display at a fixed size, due to difficulty reading them.

HTML and CSS were devised with these situations in mind.

3

Thing is, according to the CSS purists, tables are a Bad Thing for layout purposes. I tend to agree from a theoretical standpoint. CSS positioning is better, especially from an accessibility stand point.

But when they designed CSS positioning… they forgot to make an easy, non-hackish way to make multiple columns on a web page. I have yet to figure out how they could have left out such a fundamental feature.

Oh, and yeah, font sizes are a pain in the butt too.

4

drewbert, check out Position is Everything. They have some nice demo layouts using CSS. I am just getting started with CSS and am having fun figuring things out.

5

Unless, of course, they use a browser that doesn’t suck.

[/Opera zealot]

6

Oh, like Mozilla?

:wink:

7

Oh don’t get me started on cross-browser compatability either. grumble