DEV Community

Discussion on: Back to Basic: Should we use Rem, Em or Pixel?

Collapse
 
ortonomy profile image
πŸ…–πŸ…‘πŸ…”πŸ…–πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…¨ πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…£πŸ…žπŸ…

Hmmm, you simultaneously complain about 'slowing down the development process' with 'difficult maths' but you won't make it easier for yourself to know exactly what the REM refers to...

Good luck with that!

Thread Thread
 
theodorusclarence profile image
Theodorus Clarence

Cool! Looking forward to see a blog/your work with that approach. By the way, using the 62.5%, do we have to redeclare all default font sizes? Considering that now the p default font size is 10px.

Thread Thread
 
dillonheadley profile image
Dillon Headley

My approach for a while has been:
:root { font-size: 62.5% }
body { font-size: 1.6rem }

That way the user can still change the browser’s font size if needed, Rems are easy to reason on (1rem = 10px) AND all you still have the 16px default size.

Thread Thread
 
ortonomy profile image
πŸ…–πŸ…‘πŸ…”πŸ…–πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…¨ πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…£πŸ…žπŸ…

Right. I thought this was standardised a while ago in this fashion

Thread Thread
 
dillonheadley profile image
Dillon Headley

There is no standard lol the only baseline is that generally the browser starts at a 16px size. Each library or reset or normalize you use is just normal css someone wrote. They had to make a decision with this root font size but from what I’ve seen most just leave it at the default.

Thread Thread
 
ortonomy profile image
πŸ…–πŸ…‘πŸ…”πŸ…–πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…¨ πŸ…žπŸ…‘πŸ…£πŸ…žπŸ…

Who said anything about 'normalize' or'resets'? Not sure it was ever related to a CSS reset. 16px is an awkward unit to reason about. When I said 'standardised', perhaps 'convention' would have been more reasonable -- an approach adopted by many many developers.

Just do a search for css 62.5% and you'll find tons of articles about the technique, dating as far back as 10 years ago. , just another thing in a front-end devs toolbox to speed up development and forget about it.

Thread Thread
 
dillonheadley profile image
Dillon Headley

I bring up css libs and resets because a lot of devs (particularly newer devs) use them and likely assume that whoever made it "is doing it right". I wanted to point out that this assumption isn't true in this case (and many others).
I agree its a convention but not one set up default anywhere.