Twenty Eleven Font Sizes (and Line Heights)

[cgrymala]

Just out of curiosity, is there a specific reason that the font-size properties in the Twenty Eleven style sheet are all coded in pixel sizes rather than percentages or em units?

I understand this gives slightly better control over the exact font sizes, but it also makes the theme infinitely more difficult to extend when developing a child theme.

If em units or percentages were used, with a single pixel font-size declaration at the top (html{ font-size: 16px }, for instance), then a person wanting to increase or decrease the base font-size for their website would simply need to create a child theme with the following content in the style.css file and all of the fonts and line-heights would be automatically adjusted.

@import url('../twentyeleven/style.css');
html{ font-size: 18px }

As it stands, however, if a person wants to increase the base font-size for their website using the Twenty Eleven theme, they would have to override a total of 71 separate font-size declarations (and a handful of line-height declarations) within the main style.css file for that parent theme.

I'm happy to work up a patch replacing all of the px font-size and line-height declarations with em units if there isn't a compelling reason to keep those items set in pixels.

[nacin]

This is probably something to keep in mind for future default themes. Too late to change this now.

Ultimately, it appears to be a matter of preference. I've always found that doing em/% across the board with a base font-size is a real pain, myself.