A Complete Guide to Web Design

402 Chapter 23 – Cascading Style Sheets

Properties

Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition

lighter) or as one of the nine numeric values listed above. The default font

weight isnormal, which corresponds to 400 on the numeric scale. Typical

boldtext corresponds to 700 on the numeric scale. There may not be a font

face within a family that corresponds to each of the nine levels of boldness

(some may come in onlynormal andbold weights).

Unfortunately, the current browsers are inconsistent in support of the font-

weight property.

font-size

Values:

absolute size|relative size|length|percentage

Applies to:

All elements

Inherited:

Yes

As the name suggests, thefont-sizeproperty specifies the size of the text

element. There are four methods for specifying font size:

Absolute sizes

Values: xx-small|x-small|small|medium|large|x-large|xx-

large

Example:H1 { font-size: x-large }

Absolute sizes are descriptive terms that reference a table of sizes kept by

the browser.

Relative sizes

Values:larger|smaller

Example:H1 { font-size: larger }

These values specify the size of the type relative to the parent object.

Length sizes

Values:number+em|ex|px|pt|pc|mm|cm|in

Example:H1 { font-size: 24pt }

You can also specify font size using any of the length values described in

the “Length Units” section earlier in this chapter.

Percentage sizes

Values:n%

Example:H1 { font-size: 125% }

This specifies font size as a percentage of the inherited size. For instance,

in this example the H1 will be 125% larger than the size of regular body

text.