Get with the zooming program

Hands up who didn’t read the spec properly :*). Foolish, schoolbory error. I have been working on a job and the design spec says “Assume the text size is fixed [my emphasis] in pixels”. With my old accessibility hat on, and years of making web sites with text zoomable in IE6 (ie using the ems or keyword methods), I duly blanked that part of the spec out my mind. (I’ve also noticed that these articles are dated 2001 and 2003!! Have a look at the more recent [How to size text in CSS] article 3. Using font-size keywords can be useful if you ever include content and stylesheets from other sites, as you’ll avoid problems with Inherited Shrinkage if there is a clash of the stylesheets using the ems method.)

After struggling with curvey corner backgrounds for a few hours, I emailed my woes to the project manager. Assume the text size is fixed!!! he hollered, via email and set the font size in pixels!!. Double doh. This means that users of Internet Explorer 6 can’t increase the size of the text. Hey, this is only roughly 30% of the browser market. But in IE7 and Firefox 3, the default is to zoom the whole page. So any background curvey corners are zoomed as well. As IE6 fades slowly into obscurity, pixel perfect layouts are becoming the norm, and my oh my, are they ever so much easier to build.