[Sigia-l] AOL Stops the Pop-Up

[George Olsen]

PeterV said:
> Hey, I just noticed the new Wired design has text-sizing buttons that
> are *relative* to your browser settings (unlike the text sizing seen so
> far on many weblogs that ignore your browser settings which is a bad
> thing). The first accessible text-sizings buttons I have ever seen.

They're using "em" as a unit of measure instead of "px" for their type.
This gets around a long-running bug in multiple versions in IE that
disables text resizing when you use pixels.

The problem was that using ems in 4.x browsers was... shall we say...
unpredictable... so many people were forced to use pixels to avoid bugs.

With 4.x browsers dropping off the map -- particularly for Wired's
audience -- you'll see more people switching to ems.

Incidently, the other factor why people used pixels is that ems are
conceptually more difficult for designers to work with. Designers are
comfortable specing type in pixels because it's a unit they understand.
While MacIE now renders at 96dpi (to match Windows) rather than the
traditional 72 dpi (which is almost identical to the traditional "points"
systems that designers are trained in) it's an easy mental conversion for
designers to deal with. (For example, 12 px type is equivalent to 9 pt
type.)

While it's true ems are based on a typographic unit, it's used in a way
that designers aren't used to. Because it's based on a size relative to
the default point size of the user's browser, you end up with specs like
0.85em and 1.1em. I'm sure people will grow used to it, but it requires
some mental retooling.
_____________________________________________________________________
George Olsen                           george at interactionbydesign.com
User Experience Architect                                310-993-0467