Comments on: CSS line-height property

By: Lesa

Lesa — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:16:40 +0000

I don’t know anyone who uses ‘ex’ measurements, and for good reason. They’re just too inconsistent from font to font, and I don’t know why it was even invented in the first place.

As for ^{and _{, why not just style the ^{and _{tags themselves, instead of creating class names? ^{and _{aren’t just used for visual presentation. They actually mean something, so the proper coding technique is to use those tags when you are denoting superscript and subscript. How would artificial intelligence know the difference between H₂O and H2O, if the 2 doesn’t have the specific markup that classifies it as subscript?}}}}}}

By: pastor rick

pastor rick — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:32:38 +0000

The em is the height of the letter M’s font while the ex is the height of the letter x’s font. The results can prove very dramatic (width-wise) in the box model depending on which font (or font family) is being used by the site.

The (x)HTML tags are good if being used for fixed mark-ups limited to superscripts 1, 2 and 3 but some browsers will not recognize superscripts beyond that which makes it much easier to create the CSS class using the ex measurement to simulate the sup/sub-script like this:

.sup {vertical-align:0;position:relative;bottom:1.2ex;font-style:normal;font-size:65%;}

instead of fighting the HTML code with hacks to simulate the effect (especially with mathematical formulas)…

By: Lesa

Lesa — Sun, 10 May 2009 19:32:30 +0000

I’m sorry, you lost me there. The ex?

The (x)HTML tags ^{and _{are used for superscript and subscript.}}

By: pastor rick

pastor rick — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:48:50 +0000

Hey, you forgot the ex! The only thing it is good for (imho) is moving/styling text above and below the normal line-height to create super/sub-scripts but still…