I noticed that when the dpi is set high than 96 to like 120 my site gets messed up using either Firefox or IE7. The CSS basically breaks. Anyone know how to fix this?
Link to web-site
Thanks
The site uses a fixed-size layout, but mixes the units px and pt. When changing the dpi of your screen, the relative size of these units changes, ie the site is broken by design.
What you should do:
don't use pt for screen layouts - pt is for printing only
read up on liquid layouts and the relative unit em
There's not really a fix that can prevent anything happening if a user has adjusted their Windows DPI setting. Altering Windows to 'large fonts' mode, or setting it to a DPI setting other than the default, affects all layout in IE.
However, this should never cause a site to massively break. A few things shall be slightly misaligned, perhaps, due to rounding of values.
The site you've pointed to indeed does break quite massively when the font size is changed - for instance, change the default font in the browser (or set Firefox to "Zoom Text Only"). Text from the buttons completely leaves the buttons and starts hovering elsewhere.
It looks like the main cause of this, at least with the buttons across the top, is that the whole row of buttons is single background image and the text inside them are floated elements which match up with the background image only at a given font size - any adjustment to their size and position and they become out of whack with their background.
When designing, always change the zoom setting (in IE7 and Firefox) and the font size (eg in Firefox using "Zoom Text Only") and make sure that those things that do change in size, don't break the site. In some conditions, things specified in "pt" will scale while things specified in "px" won't.
How you could fix it
It's clear that you've designed everything to be a certain size in pixels, including the header and all the buttons/tabs. If you want to do this, declare the header DIV to be position: relative, and position the H1, H2, and UL inside it absolutely, using pixel values (relative to the containing div). Remove the margins, padding etc from the DIV to simplify. Specify widths, heights and top margins of the LI elements using pixels.
What I would do
Normally, I would build things like this to be flexible, so that if for some reason a person had really big fonts enabled on their browser, it would stretch nicely to handle it. That isn't really possible with your background images, because they are build especially for one given size only. So I'd have a repeatable background on the header, and I'd do each background for each button separately. Obviously, this is going to be more work.
Related
Learning about rem and try to make whole website responsive.
According to the value of 1rem, should I be scaling:
Font sizes and margins/paddings around text
margins/paddings/size of elements that do not directly contain text like components and images
Does this depend on the layout?
For example, I have an image in a card component. As user increases the font size, image or space around it might stay small next to a larger font.
Should I let this happen or scale image with the font size? I know the setting in the browser only changes font size. On Facebook, for instance, font size from browser settings does not affect the images or component sizes.
Should I then only worry about text?
I think this is entirely based on context/preference but,
Generally yes, if you are using 'em' for padding/margin (which you should be) this will scale automatically however to the font-size of its element.
Depends on the element, text is hard to read for some people as its small lines in unique shapes so this makes the most sense to scale however images and other elements are generally a lot easier to look at. - if the content of the element is something like an icon for button I would probably scale it with text as it is likely to be adjacent to some text so would look weird if the text scaled but the element didn't. Otherwise I would just use responsive web design such as flex/grid to fill the space of a page, this is "scaling" however less for accessibility and more for design.
I got a really weird thing going on.
On my currently developing website the background positioning of social and e-mail buttons differ a lot between my mac from other computers.
This is how it looks on my screen on resolution 1600 x 1000 (I also checked on other so it's probably not the case)
(source: mikolajgrzyb.com)
The Question is: Why does it happen and how can i fix this problem (to display correctly on every computer)?
You're mixing em with px when you position the backgrounds in the CSS, which is probably the reason why it looks different.
.bluebtn {
background: url("../images/icons.svg") no-repeat scroll 0 -2.7em transparent;
}
You should use em for font-sizing only.
Check some of these links out for an explanation for when to use what:
em, px, pt, cm, in…
Why em instead of px?
em should be used when you want to define something relative to the size of characters in the current font. Unless you have overridden
font style (using px units for example), 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.
Helpful suggestions
Preload the images. The first time hovering over your buttons makes it lag.
The lists on your right are annoying. Consider a more user friendly approach where it doesn't scroll back up after you mouse out, use the click-to-open click-to-close approach. The approach you're using now makes it difficult to navigate between the list items.
It also seems to get stuck at times.
Consider using a different color than blue for text that aren't links. It can be confusing to the average users who are used to blue text for links.
You misspelled processing, responsive, cutting, preparing and layout.
I should always be capitalized.
I have a set of A tags with display set to block. Each each is specifically has a border on the right. They fit perfectly into a container. However, when the page is zoomed out using the browser's zoom control, everything but the borders scale and the layout is broken. Is there a way to fix this?
This behavior can be replicated in Firefox 3.6.10 and Safari 4.
I had never before noticed that the borders do not scale.
try to set the border-with in em instead of px - if your font-size is 12px, you could write
border-width: 0.09 em;
this will be 1px width in normal size, and hopefully it scales correct (can't test it now, sorry).
There are other things that won't scale either -- radio buttons and select boxes are the classic ones, though it does differ between browsers.
Also, you'll get different effects depending on the sizing units you use for your CSS -- ie whether you use %, px or em, etc. Again, this will vary between browsers.
So the bottom line is that using the browser's zoom function is likely to break things on your layout. I honestly wouldn't expect things to be perfect with zoom, nor the same results in different browsers.
Shouldn't we use "Pixel" for anything in CSS if we are making a site for mobile devices?
px for layout and font. Should we only use em or % for everything on mobile sites?
and if i'm using <img> then should i defined height and width for <img> in HTML code? or it's good to not to define. or i should define size in css for <img> also in % or em
Edit:
Note: Question is not again about px vs em debate My question is specifically for separate mobile site. when we are making separate mobile site with different domain or sub-domain.
Everything depends on the context. Like with CSS for desktop browsers, there are situations where using pixels is not a good idea (for example mostly for font sizes), and there are situations where pixels are still very useful (for example fixed layout).
In general, avoid using pixels every-time you don't need to. For example, there is no reason to do it for fonts: it's not you, but the user who chooses if the font must be big on a high-res screen or not. Using percentages also helps you somehow to remember that a piece of text can never have an exact width and height, and force you to adapt your design.
Now, sometimes, for cost or other reasons, you have to do fixed layouts, or at least some parts of a page, associating images and text, have to be fixed in size. In this case, there is nothing wrong to use pixels. If I have a <div/> with some text inside and a pretty 200×100px background, the most obvious thing is to set the width and the height of this <div/> to 200 and 100 pixels.
if i'm using <img> then should i defined height and width for <img> in HTML code?
IMHO, you never should do that. The size of an image is purely a layout/design thing, so it has nothing to do with HTML, but with CSS.
Do you have to specify the size of an image in CSS? If you want your image to be displayed 100%, than no, you don't have to: this is by default in every browser. If you want to scale it down and, for some reasons, you can't scale the image itself than save the scaled image on server, than yes, you may want to specify the size of the image.
Remember than sending a big image and scale is down on client side is always a bad idea. The visual quality might be affected, and the client will have to wait more to see the image appear.
Actually, I recommend using different CSS files (and sometimes different templates) for browsers vs. mobile. Mobile isn't just a smaller browser, it is a fundamentally different user experience.
As for the pixel issue, I tend to use pixels in my base CSS rules and then use % or em's everywhere else so that things scale up and down together. It doesn't always work the way I would like, but it normally allows a lot of tweaking during development.
in my projects i use em for sizing of font only with body {62.5%}?
with this method i can easily calculate em value.
so what are pros and cons if i use em sizing unit for width, height, padding, margin, line-height, even for inline images also along with font for fixed width layouts?
Ems are wonderful units for a good designer. It all rests on what you're taking as pixel perfect. Since most front-enders will only get an image (maybe a .psd file) from the designers, it might seem a good idea to keep every pixel as is. Which is good, except that you can't rely on web browsers to be pixel perfect.
Imagine a browser with a different font, or a font with a different aspect. Imagine a user who enlarges the default font or who zooms in (using those browsers that only enlarge the font). A margin set in px will still show up with the exact px value you gave it. An em-based margin will stretch according to the font-size.
Also, they're not that hard to work with. Define a base font-size and line-height and apply it to your (after a good reset, of course). Then change it only for the titles (you shouldn't have more than 6 titles) and for any region where it makes sense to change the font-size (a sidebar or footer). You will do 3 or 4 calculations, everyone will be happy :)
The biggest downside is in indentation and text-block alignment with fonts of different sizes with em-sizing. It gets hard to line things up exactly – if that's important to you (and it should be).
Well if you understand how em work you can do just about anything you can do with pixels for example but with a bit more calculation.
Actually you could do more, for example, if you have a h1 header you could specify line-height and bottom margin in em's to they always reflect the font size of that header. As you increase a font size of header you increase the margins and line-height too.
This can be used to create a dynamic vertical rhythm for example.
Also if you build a complete web site in relative units you can achieve zoom effect in older browser, etc.
But with modern browsers and if you can afford to not to support behemonts like IE6 you can use absolute units and still get a full page zoom.
Em-sizing is useful for liquid layouts, but less so for fixed layouts. Not to say that it is useless, but a fixed layout is easier to set up using pixels. You can of course continue using ems for font sizing.