Why em instead of px?

Question

I heard you should define sizes and distances in your stylesheet with em instead of in pixels. So the question is why should I use em instead of px when defining styles in c

Answer 1

Avoid em or px use rem instead becuase its easier to find the computed value. But between em and px, px is better because em is hard to debug.

Answer 2

You probably want to use em for font sizes until IE6 is gone (from your site). Px will be alright when page zooming (as opposed to text zooming) becomes the standard behaviour.

Traingamer already provided the neccessary links.

Answer 3

It is wrong to say that one is a better choice than the other (or both wouldn't have been given their own purpose in the spec). It may even be worth noting that StackOverflow makes extensive use of px units. It is not the poor choice Spoike was told it was.

Definition of units

• px is an absolute unit of measurement (like in, pt, or cm) that also happens to be 1/96 of an in unit (more on why later). Because it is an absolute measurement, it may be used any time you want to define something to be a particular size, rather than being proportional to something else like the size of the browser window or the font size.

  Like all the other absolute units, px units don't scale according to the width of the browser window. Thus, if your entire page design uses absolute units such as px rather than %, it won't adapt to the width of the browser. This is not inherently good or bad, just a choice that the designer needs to make between adhering to an exact size and being inflexible versus stretching but in the process not adhering to an exact size. It would be typical for a site to have a mix of fixed-size and flexible-sized objects.

  Fixed size elements often need to be incorporated into the page - such as advertising banners, logos or icons. This ensures you almost always need at least some px-based measurements in a design. Images, for example, will (by default) be scaled such that each pixel is 1*px* in size, so if you are designing around an image you'll need px units. It is also very useful for precise font sizing, and for border widths, where due to rounding it makes the most sense to use px units for the majority of screens.

  All absolute measurements are rigidly related to each other; that is, 1in is always 96px, just as 1in is always 72pt. (Note that 1in is almost never actually a physical inch when talking about screen-based media). All absolute measurements assume a nominal screen resolution of 96ppi and a nominal viewing distance of a desktop monitor, and on such a screen one px will be equal to one physical pixel on the screen and one in will be equal to 96 physical pixels. On screens that differ significantly in either pixel density or viewing distance, or if the user has zoomed the page using the browser's zoom function, px will no longer necessarily relate to physical pixels.

• em is not an absolute unit - it is a unit that is relative to the currently chosen font size. Unless you have overridden font style by setting your font size with an absolute unit (such as px or pt), this will be affected by the choice of fonts in the user's browser or OS if they have made one, so it does not make sense to use em as a general unit of length except where you specifically want it to scale as the font size scales.

  Use em when you specifically want the size of something to depend on the current font size.

• % is also a relative unit, in this case, relative to either the height or width of a parent element. They are a good alternative to px units for things like the total width of a design if your design does not rely on specific pixel sizes to set its size.

  Using % units in your design allows your design to adapt to the width of the screen/device, whereas using an absolute unit such as px does not.

Answer 4

A very practical reason is that IE 6 doesn't let you resize the font if it's specified using px, whereas it does if you use a relative unit such as em or percentages. Not allowing the user to resize the font is very bad for accessibility. Although it's in decline, there are still a lot of IE 6 users out there.

Answer 5

The main reason for using em or percentages is to allow the user to change the text size without breaking the design. If you design with fonts specified in px, they do not change size (in IE 6 and others) if the user chooses text size - larger. This is very bad for users with visual handicaps.

For several examples of and articles on designs like this (there are a myriad to choose from), see the latest issue of A List Apart: Fluid Grids, the older article How to Size Text in CSS or Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design.

Your images should still be displayed with px sizes, but, in general, it is not considered good form to size your text with px.

As much as I personally despise IE6, it is currently the only browser approved for the bulk of the users in our Fortune 200 company.

Answer 6

The top voted answer here from thomasrutter is right in his response about the em. But is very very wrong about the size of a pixel. So even though it is old, I cannot let it be undebated.

A computer screen is normally NOT 96dpi! (Or ppi, if you want to be pedantic.)

A pixel does NOT have a fixed physical size.
(Yes, it is fixed within one screen only, but in the next screen a pixel is most likely bigger, or smaller, and certainly NOT 1/96 of an inch.)


Proof
Draw a line, 960 pixels long. Measure it with a physical ruler. Is it 10 inches? No..?
Connect your laptop to your TV. Is the line 10 inches now? Still not?
Show the line on your iPhone. Still same size? Why not?

Who the heck invented the 96dpi computer screen myth?
(Some religions operate with a 72dpi myth. But equally wrong.)