All three methods
have advantages and disadvantages. Jeffrey Zeldman and other CCS
mavens advocate keywords as the least problematic of the three
(see A List Apart at www.alistapart.com/articles/sizematters/), but
the keyword method requires some sophisticated CSS to make fonts
display at consistent sizes in all browsers and only offers a limited
number of font sizes. For this reason, and others I will cover as we
go forward, I style font sizes in ems.
The Pros and Cons of Using Proportional Sizing
When you start to develop a style sheet, one key decision is the kind of units you will use to size type: absolute (points,
inches, etc.) or relative (percentages, ems, etc.). The old way was to use pixels, but Internet Explorer, and other less-compliant
browsers cannot scale type set in absolute units when the user selects a different size from a choice such as Type
Size (exact wording varies between browsers) in the View menu. So now the trend is towards using relative sizes. Here
are the pros and cons of doing that:
Pros:
??? All type scales proportionally if the user uses the Text Size menu choice (it may be named differently in some
browsers) to set the text larger or smaller. This is very user friendly and is an important step in making your site
accessible to the visually impaired or to someone who has a super high-resolution monitor with pixels the size of
grains of sand.
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