I get that (and I certainly feel like accessibility should always be a concern on web sites).

With that said, the goal of that part of my presentation was to simply outline the pros and cons of each method, and let people decide for themselves. The pro of relative sizes are greater accessibility. The con is more complicated math. Vice versa for absolute sizes.

I believe the audience was smart enough to take that and decide for themselves which is most appropriate. I don’t like speaking in absolutes (i.e. “ems or percentages, all the time”). Design is about decisions and dependencies, and saying anything involving the words “never” or “always” is just against my nature. I like to give people the tools to make their own decisions rather than telling them what to do.

That’s all.

I think the issue is that there are quite a few people who feel that accessibility should *always* be a concern on web sites, which essentially means that best practises == ems or percentages, all the time.

Here’s hoping we can switch to pixels before the end of this millennium, hey…

I have to say, I’m really dissapointed that people are blogging that I said we should use absolutley sized text. I think I was very clear that relative sizes were the best bet when accessibility is of top concern. I’m not really sure why people took it otherwise, as I’ve gone back and looked at the slides, and they certainly list the accessibility concerns with abdolutley sized type. That said, I obviously I was unclear in some way, so I absolutley apologize for that.