Nick Cowie wrote:
Samuel
You wrote:
body { font-size .8em; }
p { font-size : 90%;
(adjust per design to get the correct sizes etc)
}
That is asking for trouble, you really need to watch out for the cascade.
Get a p inside a p,
It's very rare that p elements would be nested like that and under
normal HTML conditions almost impossible, at least to do so
accidentally. It can be done using this, for example, but rare.
<p><object><p>...</p></object></p>
(object can also be replaced with other elements like ins and del for a
similar result)
an li inside an li or a li inside a p and suddenly
Again, li inside p is difficult to achieve, but nested lis are a good
example.
personally it is
body { font-size 76%}
That's extremely small for the main body copy. Such sizes should be
reserved for relatively unimportant footer text like copyright notices,
etc. I don't recommend anything below 80%, but I also don't recommend
using % (or em or ex) for setting font sizes for the reasons you gave above.
Personally, I recommend using the font-size keywords because they don't
suffer from such problems.
body { font-size: small; }
is generally acceptable and is approximately the same as 80% of the
default font-size. 'medium' is best for body-copy although many
designers would likely object. There are some obsolete browsers that
get the sizes wrong, for which there is a hack [1], but I don't bother
with it.
[1] http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_26_using_relative_font_sizes.html
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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