Topic: Default font size in IE

Here's another one for the 'All Browsers Suck' section:

Today I've been fiddling with some CSS layouts again. One example's here:

http://www.erik-enseleit.de/neu/

While trying out several font sizes and units I noticed that Mozilla lets you resize the document's text no matter if its size is specified in an abolute (px) or relative (em) way, while IE only lets you resize text which has a relative size. So I thought, why not just stick to ems and let everyone resize it as they like?

Now as a result of this I've got a page with font sizes set in ems and it's even looking the same in IE 6 and Mozilla when their text zoom is set to 100% / Default size. But somehow I seem to remember that at least some versions of IE don't have their font size setting set to "Default" by default. Or maybe I just made that up...

Anyway, does anyone know more about this? Is it true? And if it is, is there some kind of workaround? I'd really like to know if relatively-sized texts are a thing to consider or to forget about nowadays

Thanks in advance for any information you might have.



[This message has been edited by kuckus (edited 12-25-2002).]

I haven't heard anything about IE not using 'default' as the default text size before. IE started at medium font size for me...

I think you should use relative sizes on almost everything when you make your page. That way people with bad sight will be able to see it. Those using Mozilla with a different font size will be able to see at it is supposed to be as well. And usually it isn't that hard to make the site liquid enough to use different font sizes if you stick to CSS...

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

No strange font size defaults in IE? Cool, then using ems instead of pixels will feel even better

There are problems with em's in some older browsers... I'm not sure how much older (could even be as recent as IE 5). I never really understood the problems entirely, but they were reasonably serious. (Like, 2em would be interpreted as 2px by the browser.)