HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS- P5: I’ve been around the Web for a while now some might say I’ve been here from the beginning. And one thing that always bothered me about the Web was its inherent inability to disentangle content from presentation. | The font-size Property only as decorative. 1 What this actually means is anyone s guess and the makers of the various web browsers have taken some pretty wild guesses. Internet Explorer tends to display fantasy text in a font similar to Blackadder ITC a font that comes as part of Microsoft s Office package and is very difficult to read at small sizes . Firefox displays the text in Showcard Gothic another Microsoft Office font which is dramatically different from Internet Explorer s choice. Safari displays Papyrus though more common than the others this font also looks very different than either of them. For now it s probably best to steer clear of using the fantasy generic font family unless you re sure you want a dramatic decorative font and you re displaying the text in a large size. The font-size Property Setting font size is one of the most troublesome aspects of web design because browsers vary widely in the ways they understand and apply the key concepts that determine how fonts will be sized for display. Before we explore this issue any further let s take a look at the official definition of the ways in which you can determine the size of a font on a web page. You can specify the font size you wish to use by selecting from a collection of seven constants xx-small x-small small medium large x-large xx-large These constants define what are referred to as absolute sizes but as we ll see in practice absolute sizes are not absolute in the usual sense of that word. Another 1 This description was added to the CSS documentation in version 3 which is still a working draft at the time of writing. This description could be improved in the future to provide more predictable results for web designers. 99 Licensed to siowchen@ Chapter 6 Working with Fonts way to define absolute font sizes is to specify a length value in units such as pixels or points. Relative font sizes can be defined in three ways using the constants larger and smaller using the relative .
