Using Relative Font Sizes

Web sites, with few exceptions, middle on words. News, opinions, thoughts, ideas, stories, unique writing, e-commerce all words. Visual design and images are significant, to be sure, but if people can't read your words, what's the point?

In the fall of 2000, Jeffrey Zeldman notably said that relation font sizing was impossible because of an overwhelming diversity of browser bugs, starting with Netscape 4 and ending in the most modern browsers. Since then, Netscape 4 still hasn't gotten any better, and it still hasn't gone away, but at least we've all educated a thing or two about taming the browsers and making relative font sizing a reality.

Use relative font sizes in browsers that can handle them, and absolute font sizes in Netscape 4, which does not dependably support relative font sizes. You can do this even if you don't use multiple style sheets. In a minute, I'll give copy-and-paste solutions for the default Movable Type template and all default Radio themes. And a long explanation of the technique itself to help you realize it in other templates.