Most people probably haven't paid attention to it, but browsers have changed the way they handle resizing a webpage. Instead of just resizing text as they once did, today's browsers actually zoom the entire page -- the result is that the page structure remains intact, it's simply larger.
With the old method only the text on a page was resized, which caused all sorts of problems with many layouts and, thanks to the fact that Internet Explorer won't resize text laid out in pixels, it meant web designers were limited to em or percentage font declarations.
As anyone who's sat down to do the math can tell you, working with percentage font rules is difficult.
However, now Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7+, Opera and soon WebKit browsers (Safari and Google Chrome) all default to zooming the entire page instead of just the text. That means that there's less of a need to use percentage font rules in your stylesheets -- the browser is handling the page zoom for you, scaling all the elements in sync.
The shift has led some designers, like Dave Shea of Mezzoblue fame, to wonder if designers should still worry about scaling text, or just let the browser handle it. Shea writes:
Shea stops short of saying that we can stop worrying entirely, but as most of the commenters on the post agree, creating a fluid, text-resizable layout is a headache and just about everyone would like to stop worrying about it.
Naturally there is still IE 6, which doesn't zoom and won't resize fonts that use pixel-based CSS rules. But consider that IE 6 is losing ground overall and only a subset of users use text resizing anyway and you have to wonder if the effort is worth the payoff. It seems like most of the people who need text resizing would have sought out a browser that does what they want by now.
In the end it all depends on the site you're building and audience you're building for, but we suspect the days where designers worry about percentage-based font rules are coming to an end.
[via Jeff Croft]
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