Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / August 2004

That's part of the design!  The whole point (no pun intended) of
absolute units is that they are specified to be absolute units,
verifiable by reference to some scratches on a metal bar in Paris -
or whatever the modern equivalent is.

(The fact is that they aren't "absolute" in practice, because screens
usually aren't calibrated to a standard measure; but that's a bug in
the implementation, not in the specification).

It's not as if the CSS specification doesn't address this problem
already:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#length-units

Absolute length units are only useful when the physical properties of
the output medium are known.

In short: "unfit for screen display situations".  The only way to deal
with such inappropriate specifications is to override them.  One
really should -not- expect to be able to re-scale them - that would be
defeating their purpose, i.e introducing a bug in order to compensate
for bad design.  But CSS is meant to be optional, so there's nothing
wrong with overriding the inappropriate specification entirely,
IMNSHO.

Ah: CSS pixel units are a category of their own; they don't officially
fall under "absolute length units", they're supposed to be adjusted to
the display situation (device resolution and expected viewing
distance).  In practice, of course, it's a different story...

But in theory, CSS px units (properly scaled according to the
principles in the CSS spec) would be an appropriate choice for a mass
viewing situation, e.g for a projection screen, where individual
choice of font size according to each reader's wishes or needs is not
feasible.

Of course - no disagreement about the conclusion!