I was at Jeff Croft’s session on Elegant Web Typography at Web Directions South when he talked about font sizing. He unwittingly caused a bit of a silent outcry, sending the Twitter back channel crazy, when he mentioned that he uses pixels to size text rather than an IE6-supported relative unit such as ems or percentages.

His reasoning was that people who need to enlarge font size in their browsers will have already moved off Internet Explorer 6 and onto a browser that allows them to do that already (Internet Explorer 6 does not allow resizing of text defined in pixels or points, whereas it does allow resizing of text defined in ems, percentages or keywords).

I’m with the others who commented via Twitter during the presentation – I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. At any rate, at Clever Starfish we almost always use ems for text sizing rather than pixels (I’m sure there are exceptions in certain circumstances, but for the most part, we try).

SitePoint’s Kevin Yank interviewed Derek Featherstone during the conference and have a recording of that session available on their site, as well as a transcript: Derek Featherstone: Accessibility is More Than Compliance. in it, Kevin asks Derek what he thinks about Jeff’s statements and his opinion is what I would expect from an accessibility expert: until we can be sure that IE6 is not being used any more, we can’t afford not to make allowances. It was such a hot topic that Kevin pulled out Derek’s response on just that point for a separate post: Pixel Fonts a Hot Button Topic at WSD08. Does anyone else find it funny that the photo of Derek used on that post is one credited to Jeff?

I remember dancing in glee the day that The Counter told me that worldwide, Netscape 4 usage had dropped to under 2% for the third month running – that was when my previous employer officially decreed that we no longer supported it for general web sites. I’m sure it’s going to be a long time before we can hold Internet Explorer 6 in the same kind of contempt, but hold out web peeps – that day will come. For the record, The Counter reports that in September 2008, IE6 was at 36%, still well ahead of Firefox on 17% but just below Internet Explorer 7 at 41%.

For the record, I think that the rest of Jeff’s session was very good – he covered the basics of web typography, and touched on grid systems and the importance of using proper typographical symbols for quotes, dashes and the like (which I also attempt to do also).