Comments on: Using em’s for font sizing

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:08:04 +0000

Completely agree Evan, that was the point of the article that we should be using em’s on the web

By: London Web Designer Evan Skuthorpe

London Web Designer Evan Skuthorpe — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:49:43 +0000

I’ve been using em for font sizes for a few years now and wouldn’t recommend going back to px sizes.. em’s are just better… so there!

By: Andy Ford

Andy Ford — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:47:57 +0000

@Dave – No problem! You can view source and copy id or download it from the main page http://aloestudios.com/code/emchart/ however I do plan on keeping it available for a long time =)

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:17:33 +0000

Yeah thanks Andy, I’ve been using it for as long as I can remember. It’s easy to calculate an em once you know the formula but as a quick reference it’s a fantastic tool and something I make use of whenever I’m putting some CSS together Thanks again.

By: Andy Ford

Andy Ford — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:36:33 +0000

I’m glad to see that my EmChart is helpful to other developers! Cheers!

By: gorkreg

gorkreg — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:09:47 +0000

I am (was) one of those designers who “revert back to using pixels” because of the inheriting ems problem. Never understood why it didn´t work. Thanks a million!

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:49:33 +0000

Thanks, that might be another article later then… it’s basically just a blockquote with a background graphic and left padding to push the text over. Simple but effective

By: Johny Favourite

Johny Favourite — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:47:07 +0000

Only just noticed dude – your quotes look awesome!

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:16:59 +0000

Hi Brody, that’s a good question. Personally if I was using 16px as my base then I wouldn’t reinforce it as there wouldn’t really be much point as specifying 1em would essentially be the same as specifying 100% width on a block level element.

However, using 0.625em does make it easier for the calculations and won’t effect accessibility at all as all elements are then scaled according to this baseline anyway.

A more difficult question regards whether you should even mess with font sizes at all if you want a web application to be truly accessible on all devices and whether you should leave the individual device or browser to decide what would be the optimal font and size to display on that particular display.

Personally though, I think that using font sizes to display content is fine from an accessibility point of view as long as you build a website that allows the user to increase the font size when they need to, which using ems certainly provides.

Hope that answers your question?

By: Brody

Brody — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:40:25 +0000

So Dave, you mentioned 16px is a default font size for most browsers. Is it good practice to first reinforce this (or another value of choosing) in a reset.css and then start calculating your em’s based on that value?