Responsive Text - Without @media queries

#css #webdev #beginners #html

Once upon a time, I had a website where it looked great on laptop, but when I switched to phone, the text was SO TINY!!!.

So I started messing around with @media queries and found them a bit too hard to use.

Then I searched my problem in Google and found this StackOverflow post.
It had the answer to my problem!

The answer is pretty simple actually. You use the calc() function in CSS, and use rem and vmin units to write this code:

body {
  font-size: calc(0.75em + 1vmin);
}

I made responsive text with just 3 lines of CSS and without @media queries!

Top comments (11)

Pierre Vahlberg • Feb 4 '23

A reflection and some background for less senior frontend devs that I think could be useful;

Responsive as in responsive website generally means that content like images, menus, overflows and other layout elements adapts primarily to device width, since we have different desktop screen resolutions but also tablets and different size phones nowadays.

This snippet makes text size adapt in relation to the smallest of the viewport width or viewport height values, just so people who wants to understand can do so :)

Most times font size is expected to be set in relation to the design and layout and using this COULD break the design since font size now is depending on how wide/high a screen is. Using a fixed rem and scaling it using breakpoints, as your responsive layout might already do, is way more predictable and gives you less cases to assess visually when you are making changes :)

Pros and cons - gotta whey them all in 😊