"AussieTraders.com.au" <bounce@aussietraders.com.au> wrote in
news:40330a22$0$813$61c65585@uq-127creek-reader-
01.brisbane.pipenetworks.com.au:
[color=blue]
> Does that mean I should never use the <font> tag and whenever I need a
> smaller or bigger font than the default use something like:
>
> <div style="font-size: 150%">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</div>
>
> Or can you suggest something better?[/color]
You're better off using styles to set font sizes, yes, but to really get
the full benefits of styles you should be setting them in a style sheet
rather than inline with your markup. Ideally you'd give your <div> an id
(if it plays a fixed role on the page, such as a main menu) or a class (if
it's one of potentially several sections of a page that serve a particular
purpose, such as a product listing) and then specify all the styling
information for that type of section in one place in a stylesheet that's
common to all or most of the pages in your site.
When you do that, you greatly unclutter your markup (which can result in
much smaller pages and less bandwidth usage) and you gain the ability to
make changes to your site's "look and feel" *very* easily, because you just
have to change one stylesheet rather than every individual page. And that
in turn makes such changes so painless that you'll find yourself
experimenting with making small changes in your look and feel, and if you
do those experiments properly, you can wind up with quite substantial
improvements.
Using stylesheets lets you move from creating sites where the content looks
like it was forced into the layout to creating sites where the layout looks
like it was tailor-made for the content. And that's because you're not
forced to cast the layout in stone before the content has been created. At
least you're not forced by the technology; if business arrangements require
the client to sign off on the layout (done as a "comp") at the very
beginning of the project, you're still going to be pushed toward what
Christopher Schmitt calls "Twinkie sites" (i.e. the "filling" (content)
looks like it was injected into the "shell" (layout)), but at least you've
now got the possibility of changing those arrangements.
Relative or absolute font size? 
