Admin CSS uses px instead of em

[noel]

There are quite a few places where we could be using ems instead of pixels for font sizes. Support has a ticket wondering why we took this route. Despite pixels being fine in most browsers, IE botches them and doesn't let you resize them!

Best practice: ​http://alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss

[matt]

No momentum or patches here, closing, but open to a new ticket for new design.

[GrahamArmfield]

Whilst this is an old ticket it is still true in the new 'MP6' admin introduced in 3.8. I have tested it in Internet Explorer 10 on a Windows 7 machine, and it's impossible to change the font size in any of the admin screens.

In IE to change just the text size go to View -> Text size.

This is important for people with poor eyesight who wish to enlarge the text, but not to zoom - which makes everything bigger, but introduces horizontal scroll bars.

[afercia]

Wondering if it's time to start ​using root em (rem) with a fallback to pixels. Maybe worth considering for the CSS clean up roadmap. cc @helen :)

[nikolov.tmw]

Just chiming in to say that I'd volunteer as a tribute to help out with this one. I imagine that there would be a significant amount of work involved in that endeavour, so I'd be happy to give a helping hand.

If rem + px will be the road we take, then I can start slowly converting things one by one.

[helen]

I don't think this is a ticket that needs to stay open - we can discuss sizing strategies as a part of the ongoing clean up and modernization effort, but there's no single way of addressing this and it's not particularly useful for tracking, either. FWIW, I don't believe that a single blanket usage of one sizing unit is the right way to go, either. It all depends on the context of how things are built and what exactly is being sized.