Website design measurements are not inches or even centimeters. They are pixels, ems, and rems. Rems are new. When I opened the Twenty-Twelve CSS (styling) sheet, I was thrown by the new rem measurement. The first thing I did was delete all of them and used pixels or ems. That messed things up pretty well, until I came to terms with rems.
Pixels
Computer monitors have resolutions in pixels. A screen can be 72 pixels per inch (PPI), 124, etc, etc. To size a font in pixels means it will appear as that number of screen pixels. It’s a constant that depends on the number of pixels on the screen. On my monitor has many pixels per inch, so in Microsoft Word, for example, I view documents at 125% in order to see what the page will look like when I print it. On websites, I often have to increase the font in order to read it.
In addition to different pixels per inch on different monitors, pixels are sized in absolute numbers, Each style on the webpage has to be given a specific number of pixels. Since the styles may take pages of code and pixel sizes range from 36 to 8, proportions of various elements were difficult to keep consistent. And if the size or proportions were changed, each of those numbers had to be replaced.
Then ems came along.
Ems
“Em” is a typographical term that refers to the height of a letter. Other measurements on a page of text, like line-height and the proportions of titles and headings, are measured in percentages of ems. On webs pages the size of an em is established by the website designer for the site or each section of a page or the site. If the base font size is set to 16 px other sizes are set a percentages of the base font size, the em. If the base font is 16px, a smaller font might be set .75 em resulting in 14 px letters. When a base font size is increased or decreased, all the other sizes will change in relation to the base font size.
But they don’t. And there lies the problem.
Measurements, like colors, are established using “CSS,” which stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Styles change in relation to the style above them or in which they are nested in a “cascade.” If the text of a paragraph is set at .75 em, and a quote within the paragraph is set at .25em, the quote will be 25% of 75%, not 25% of the original 16 pixels. With long pages of complex CSS coding, this means sizes can change unexpectedly. Tracking down all the relationships between cascading percentages of ems can take a lot of time—unless you are mathematically inclined and can see the logical (or illogical) flow of percentages cascading on top of percentages. Designers are often not.
On top of that screen sizes began changing. One person would be using an iPhone and another a 24 inch monitor. One person a new retinal display and another a much older 72 ppi screen. Predetermined numbers meant that what was good design on one was unusable on another. Enter rems.
REMs
With the increasing variety of screen sizes and resolutions, programmers began working on “responsive design,” web pages that change according the size of the screen. What can be read on a desktop monitor may be difficult to read on a notebook and laborious on a smart phone. This required either different websites, at triple the design cost, or a web page that would change depending on the device it was being viewed on. Elements had to be able to move around according to the width of screen on mobile devices and the browser window size on desktops. A stable, non-cascading measurement became necessary.
Rem stands for “root em”. Rems work as logically as one expects ems to: in relation to the base font size of 16 px, not the size of the font immediately above it. Current version of all the mainstream browsers and mobil devices support rems, which means they can read them and render a page accurately. As a fall back, however, for those who are not using current browsers, sizes are still set in both pixels and rems.*
More on Rems
A good place to watch for updates on CSS changes is CSS-Tricks which features a blog, forums, demos, gallery, snippets of HTML and CSS, videos, and more.
A (Life Saving) Rem Calculator
And here is a calculator from Foliovision to convert a pixel measurement to rem measurement. Type in your pixels measurement and hit Enter. You will get two results—one for font-size, width, height, margin, padding and the other for line-height.
Responsive Design Calculator: Pixels to REM
*Everyone should be using current versions of browsers. They have better security protecting your computer from worms and viruses and trojan horses, and can use more features on websites. And they are faster. Old version so Internet Explorer are particularly deficient. Those users should definitely upgrade to version 9 or change browsers.