Eric Meyer brings up an interesting philosophical conundrum in his post Rounding Off about font-size rounding and the computed values web inspectors report to developers.
Go ahead and read the whole thing and come back, I’ll wait.
So, first of all, Eric’s brilliance for even presenting this issue is undisputed. However, he poses a question at the end of his post:
What do you think? Should web inspectors report the CSS computed values accurately, without regard to the actual rendering effects; or should the inspectors modify the reported values to more accurately reflect the visual rendering, thus obscuring the raw computed values
Well, very kind of you to ask, Eric. My take, is yes. I want both.
I think this is helpful in a few ways. First, knowing how browsers are interpreting values is important in writing robust, accurate stylesheets. If you’ve ever been scratching your head why that bit of typography looks a pixel or two smaller in Firefox as it does Safari then you understand what I mean.
Knowing the effective display size is important in determining how accurately the rendered design reflects designer mock-ups. Or, if you’re designing straight in the browser, making decisions on size ratios, leading and other important typographic details that are relative to the size of the type.
I didn’t do any heavy thinking or analysis on this matter, so in fair warning I could even be misunderstanding Eric’s question. But my initial thoughts are to ask why not both? And hey, it certainly felt good to do a bit of off-the-cuff writing.
