px or em?
Out of context: Reply #4
- Started
- Last post
- 32 Responses
- Jaline0
"EM vs. Pixel
A lot of the leading websites nowadays have fixed sizes, made to fit into a 800*600px resolution screen, but this has disadvantages: People with an unusually high resolution, see a tiny website or people with limited visual acuity have problems reading the text. Normally this should not be a problem because all leading browsers have the ability to zoom (Opera even zooms pictures).
But, a problem that probably everyone has encountered when zooming a random webpage is the following: The sizes grow unproportionally and in the end you end up with different text fields covering each other. The whole layout is completely messed up!
Why is that? Because most of us use pixels to define the sizes of their different boxes and fonts!
You can avoid this bad behaviour by using em-Quads for sizesWhat is an em-quad?
The name is onomatopoetic for M wideness. But this is not the real meaning anymore, nowadays, we use em as a percentage of the size of the parental element.""Writing with Em-quads is barrier free. Every user can zoom your website and view it best for his visual acuity, even if they use Internet Explorer which does not support zooming of absolute values!"