Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/04/05 17:30

On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, michele@quality-computing.com wrote:

> Okay, so now I've got four people telling me the only proper thing to
> do is use em instead of px or pt.

It's only a case of recognising the way that things are, and
making a start on exploiting it.

> Frankly, this scares me, especially with tables and forms, because I
> will never know if things are going to fit on the screen

You never *could* know that, but now you're actually aware of the
problem. That's a positive move.

> Am I making it harder than it needs to be?

I'd say so. The web was originally designed to be flexible, and it *can*
work rather well that way. From how you talk, you *were* trying to design
that flexibility *out*, but hadn't yet realised its disadvantages.

There's nothing wrong with having it look the way you wanted, in the
browsing situation you had in mind. The interesting thing, from the web's
particular point of view, is what it's going to do in a wider range of
browsing situations. Not just a few (windows can be of any size! Or
indeed none!!). But when you design flexibly, you don't have to test them
all - just a few cases in the middle and near the edges of what's
reasonable. IMHO and YMMv.

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