Posted by Andy Dingley on 09/18/05 19:20

I have a large commercial site to rebuild, where the design has been
produced by the pixel-counting method. It's also one of those sites
where cramming every space full of content is seen as better than a more
spread-out and usable design that uses some scrolling. Not surprisingly
it's the work of paper-based magazine designers, not web designers.

This leaves me with several conflicting requirements:

- The body text size for the "article" pages should be 1em, for
well-known usability reasons.

- The "index" pages may require pixel-based font sizing control,
because otherwise I can't constrain the text to fit in the available
space. These spaces are fixed pixel widths - they're usually the size of
a bitmap image. Additionally they're often "headline text" which means
few short words and some clunky behaviour for linewrapping.

- It must work cross-browser, including IE6 and IE/Mac


The real problem here is that IE blows the whole lot apart. With its
well-known problems of an excessive default scaling for ems to pixels, I
can produce a good implementation for the well-behaved browsers (even on
the Mac) but any IE rendering of the page only works when the user's
text size is reduced to "Smaller". This is particularly bad if I attempt
to use <h*> markup, where the differences are particularly visible.

Any suggestions ?

Are there any "CSS hack" based techniques which will let me set a
default size of 1em/100% for web browsers, then an 85% value for IE
only, hidden by some parser hack ?


(I am _not_ interested in a discussion of em vs. pixel sizing - that's a
different issue)

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