‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.
Continuing (and probably rounding off) yesterday’s font size theme, a quick look at that immortal troublemaker: the pixel sized font. With a twist.
As we all know, IE cannot resize text defined in pixels, not even IE7. Actually, I’m sure the IE developers would want that worded as will not, and—at least for the extent of this article—I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
For just about the entire history of modern web design, the mantra has run thus: when specifying font-size, use relative, rather than absolute, units. As a massive oversimplification of the entire subject: ems are best. However, I wonder if we’ve all misjudged the IE approach; maybe some text size should be immutable.
Admittedly, there are few use cases. One that springs to mind, however, is on show on this very page: the textual logo. At certain levels, it’s unrealistic for text to be scaled any larger. There is, after all, an extreme limit to the size at which a character can physically fit on the screen. Moreover, some text (such as a logo) is not entirely mission critical.
I’m skating on thin ice here but let’s just assume web designers are responsible enough to use a fixed font-size sensibly. A pixel-sized font on a page of otherwise scalable text, under the right conditions, might just be a whole lot more accessible than other design (mis-)strategies that can be employed today.
IE, with its ‘flexible’ (ouch, that's kind!) approach offers this very ability: tight control over some text sizes, coupled with a scalable, hands-off approach for remaining text. I wonder if we dismissed that concept just a little too rashly.
‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.
Tue 12 Apr 2011 17:57
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