I have a rant for this, thanks for the opportunity to drag it out...
With the proliferation of display devices, screens now come in a wide variety of sizes and aspect ratios. The image below illustrates the range of screens possible. Differing aspect ratios are shown on the diagonal lines with the ratio in circles towards the lower right.
Given the wide variation in screen resolution and size when we step from mobi to fondleslab to display to HDTV it is lunacy to specify screen position in term of pixels. There is no way to know what sized screen you are imaging to so it is best to reference screen sizes and positions in percentages instead of pixels. The resulting size is the percentage of the width (or height) of the enclosing container. This is most useful when specifying positions and sizes of tables and images.
Things that are text related, such as the whitespace around a paragraph or header and text sizes are best specified in em. One em was origionally the width of an M in the current font. In a multilingual world where not all alphabets have an M in them, the meaning has evolved to mean the height of the current font. As the user changes the magnification on a page the size of an em changes with it. This produces a pleasing scaled effect to the eye not possible when spacing objects in pixels.
Other unit values available are in inch, cm centimeter, mm millimeter, ex x-height of a font (x-height is usually about half the font-size), pt point - 1/72 of an inch, pc pica - 12 points and px pixels - a single dot on the screen. Best results are achieved by using em and percent to specify size. Try not to do anything else.
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Freedom ≠ Free Stuff☭ |  |
| I, for one, welcome our new Cybernetic Overlords /. | ||
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