Those days are gone.īasically points are for print. PT did have a brief love affair in design because in “ye olden days” it was the only measurement that Netscape 4.x - and by extension ancient Firefox/Mozilla Suite - obeyed sizing based on the host OS’ font-size. Trying to declare a 72th of an inch when the host OS has no idea what the actual physical screen size is? Yeah, not going to happen. Why? Because most OS don’t track the actual physical screen size. PT Īs a unit based on a real world measurement, this is relatively useless for screen media design. Some sources - even reputable ones like MDN - will try to tell you that a px is 1/96th of an inch. PX Ī pixel is the smallest addressable dot on your display (well, unless you count your colour triads). There are many different CSS metrics by which you can declare a font - but let’s start with the five big ones we see in common use. To explain why PX are bad, and what you should use instead, I think it would help to cover the major measurement types you can/would use in web design. As such you’re stuck either relying on zoom (which mangles raster images) or not being able to target your layouts based on the user’s needs. Because so many displays of different sizes have the same resolutions, or displays of the same sizes have different resolutions, there is no “physical standard” by which a pixel is based. Pixels are from an accessibility standpoint the least useful measurement.

Accessible fonts