Sent by John A. Lewis on 13 October 2002 05:05
Hello Stephanie,
Saturday, October 12, 2002, 11:05:38 PM, you wrote:
> That's a totally novel idea... But sounds like a great one... I
> already use ems and % for my text... So how would I translate that
> into my box sizes??
It depends on what type of content the box contains. If it contains
paragraphs, the ideal width is fairly wide. I'd say 30 or 40 ems, but
this is not a scientific measurement. Only extensive usability testing
will determine what is the optimum length, and let's not forget it
depends on line-height as well. The larger the line-height, the wider
the text can be (generally).
I haven't read a typography book in some time, but they talk about
ideal column width, line height, etc. Much of this traditional
typographic knowledge can be applied on screen, but many of the finer
points are lost in the low resolution.
For navigation and the like, this will be much smaller. Perhaps 10
ems. Maybe less.
This method does have its drawbacks. For instance, someone with a
large text size will get a vertical scrollbar if their monitor is at a
low resolution. As well, someone with a small text size and a monitor
at a high resolution will get a little column of text.
Also, different typefaces vary in width. Although, in practice, this
isn’t a huge problem.
The whole point of using ems, for widths and heights and margins, is
that it scales perfectly with font size. That means if someone
requires three inch high type to read, they'll get equally wide
columns. Like most things in CSS, there are tradeoffs.
Personally, I like the em method; although it works better using
min-width and max-width instead of just width. A good way to figure
out the perfect value for min-width and max-width is to test using
width, and figure out what the smallest and largest widths are
acceptable. The smallest is your min-width and the largest is your
max-width.
--
John
