Early versions of Netscape 4
ignored keywords entirely, and later releases followed the original specification to the
letter, which was updated accordingly when it was discovered that anything smaller than
medium looked like an ink-footed ant had taken a stroll across your monitor. Not to be outdone,
Internet Explorer 4 and 5 welded CSS keywords to Netscape font size tags, resulting
in the browser displaying everything at the next size down. (You can use conditional
comments to set a different font-size value for Internet Explorer 5??”see Chapter 9 for
more on this method.)
In more modern versions of Internet Explorer, fonts that are set to Small in the View ?¤ Text
Size menu can make keyword-set CSS text hard to read, but users can increase the text
size by using a more sensible setting. Also, it??™s worth noting that this is up to user choice,
and having a tiny minority of users screwing up their own settings and potentially ending
up with unreadable text is better than the vast majority not being able to resize the text
because its size is defined in pixels. Still, there??™s a better method for achieving this, as we
shall see.
Setting text using percentages and ems
As mentioned, the problem with sizing text in pixels is that the text is not resizable in
Internet Explorer. The main problem with using keywords and percentages is that the text
size isn??™t consistent across platforms or that easy to define??”at least in terms of hitting a
specific target size.
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