CSS gives some values for the font-size property to change the size of fonts through style sheets. The are:
I have set up the keword sizes viewed by IE and NN. On the right are the font sizes viewed by IE, on the left, NN. Note that I have lined up the two pictures of the tables containing the different font sizes on the larger example. This seems to be the only size that both browsers can agree on.
| CSS size values for fonts compared |
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As noted, only large seems to be a size that NN4.7 and IE5.0 can agree on. Worse yet, the default (no style information) size setting for IE is exactly the same size as IE's small size. In NN4.7, the xx-small size font is unreadable
Usually web writers are advised to set their fonts by points. Points should be familiar to anyone who has word processed. However, once again, we are presented with the dilema of cross-platform problems.
The most obvious hardware problem is the difference between PCs and MACs. MAC set point size by a one-to-one correlation to pixels, and PCs decide the size of characters set in points with some algorithm. Unix machines produce font sizes set in points by another method. Further, paragraph indents will be different on different browsers running on different platforms.
But why use these defined values in the first place? Why not just set font sizes in pixels? Well, the answer is that setting the size of fonts by pixel size leaves the viewer without control when she tries to increase font size with the browser. Further, as screen resolution increases it becomes harder to read small fonts set by pixel size. These fonts won't increase (or decrease) as the platform or the browser makes viewing changes.
The advice currently dished out is to reserve this precise formatting to areas like menu bars, but leave the content font set in some measurement that will change with browser settings.
We could abandon the use of style sheets and return to straight HTML to set our font sizes. This is exactly what a lot of sites do to remain accessable to earlier browsers. However, as Netmechanic has pointed out, the old FONT-SIZE=X attribute is unpredicatable since it is interpreted different by each browser. Each browser, depending on brand as well as the platform it runs on, makes its own decision about what point size each FONT-SIZE setting corresponds to. Their table of the point size for each setting of FONT-SIZE shows how uncomfortably large fonts can become on different platform/browser combinations.
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