On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorp...@cs.tut.fi> wrote: > 2012-01-24 8:23, Ghodmode wrote: > >> So, how big is an ‘em’? I set up a small experiment to tell me just >> that. > > > I don’t see the point of the blog entry or the experiment.
You acknowledged misconceptions. That's the point... to put aside the misconceptions for myself and those with similar experience. >> http://www.ghodmode.com/blog/2012/01/i-have-a-really-big-m/ > > > The text says ‘Letters aren’t all 1em wide.’ I find that an odd formulation, > since _no_ letter is 1em wide. Ya, but we (myself and others who have the same misunderstanding) think the 'm' is 1em wide. Understanding that it isn't is part of the point of the experiment and article. > You seem to argue against the wrong idea that em is the width of the letter > ‘m’. But that’s not the most common common misconception; people think that > em is the width of the _capital_ letter ‘M’. And it is easy to see that > these misconceptions are wrong if one just _looks_ at things. Okay. Fair enough. Capital 'M'. However, it still amounts to the same thing... the widest letter in the alphabet. We could probably have used another letter, but that wouldn't have shown the relation to the name of the unit. I hope you're not implying that anyone who didn't understand that the 'M' isn't 1em wide just wasn't paying attention... I mean, I don't care what you say about me, I make lots of mistakes, but you might offend someone ;} What things do you look at to see that 'M' isn't 1em wide? Before I did that experiment page I didn't have anything to look at that showed me a comparison of a 1em block to a single letter. > For example, putting ‘M’ or ‘m’ in a 1em by 1em box is quite sufficient. > Using any font. I don’t see why you would need Web fonts for this. It's based on the size of the font, so I was worried that it would actually fit within the 1em box. As you pointed out, I haven't been paying attention. So, I wasn't sure that a regular font would demonstrate the point. I wanted a font that was fancy enough to stick out of the block. If I used one of the generic font family names, I couldn't be sure about which font would replace it on the client side. If I used a specific font (I considered Comic Sans MS :) ), I couldn't be certain that it would be available on the client side. I chose to use a web font to get a consistent representation everywhere and because it was sufficiently fancy that I could be confident it would be bigger than its container. Thank you for your helpful and constructive comments. -- Ghodmode http://www.ghodmode.com > Yucca ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
