For once, I think we can all agree with Jakob: web designers should abandon the tyranny of absolute pixel sizes and give their users the benefit of scaleable fonts for greater accesibility.

The main problem with this is the wild inconsistency with which different browsers render relative font sizes. What looks like “70%” in one browser will not be that in another. Worse, if you rely on table-based layouts (you shouldn’t, but it will often be unavoidable), add to that Mozilla’s unique property of passing relative font sizes into table cells. Where before we were accustomed to setting a font-size for both “body” and “td” tags to avoid getting giant 1em text in our tables, now relative font-sizes will reduce your text to chicken scratches within tables in Mozilla.

Right now the only way I can see around this problem is to either not use font sizes at all and stick to whatever the browser uses as its default, or use some fancy script-based sniffing to load the stylesheet appropriate to the user’s browser. The latter, however, is too much a hack, which developers in a more ideal world should not have to resort to. Hence the need to continue the fight for standards.

Anyway, I’m still working on a solution for the Mozilla font size table cell problem. Any recommendations?