Making a given web site look the same across all browsers is a recurring worry for graphic designers. It is a painfully unfortunate reality that the standards which were intended to help ensure compatibility are implemented inconsistently by different browser vendors.
The website QuriksMode is like a vast museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of these inconsistencies, both past and present, serving as a warning to the aspiring web page designer that many a peril await those who would dance along the edges of these specifications.
I was reminded of this as I scanned through my RSS feeds and found a recently published article on IBM developerWorks that addresses the issue of making font sizing consistent on a webpage. The takeaway from the article is to use ems rather than pixels as the units of measurement for sizing, thereby sizing text on a relative basis that scales across a wide range of font sizes.
This is a practice we embraced in the development of our second generation blog template which rolled out a couple months ago. Here is what a page using this template looks like in Internet Explorer 7.
And this is what the same page looks like in Firefox 2 on the same machine.
Randy, our User Interface Engineer, when designing the new template cascading style sheet (CSS), also noted that using ems is a smart practice for more than just aesthetic reasons. It also makes the page more accessible to the visually impaired, who may need to significantly enlarge the size of the text to read the page.
The website QuriksMode is like a vast museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of these inconsistencies, both past and present, serving as a warning to the aspiring web page designer that many a peril await those who would dance along the edges of these specifications.
I was reminded of this as I scanned through my RSS feeds and found a recently published article on IBM developerWorks that addresses the issue of making font sizing consistent on a webpage. The takeaway from the article is to use ems rather than pixels as the units of measurement for sizing, thereby sizing text on a relative basis that scales across a wide range of font sizes.
This is a practice we embraced in the development of our second generation blog template which rolled out a couple months ago. Here is what a page using this template looks like in Internet Explorer 7.
And this is what the same page looks like in Firefox 2 on the same machine.
Randy, our User Interface Engineer, when designing the new template cascading style sheet (CSS), also noted that using ems is a smart practice for more than just aesthetic reasons. It also makes the page more accessible to the visually impaired, who may need to significantly enlarge the size of the text to read the page.
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