Literate Web Pages...Don't Reduce the Font Size

Don't make text smaller than HTML's default virtual font size.

Don't use absolute font sizes.

Why Not

Your text becomes uncomfortably or unreadably small when the reader has adjusted the browser to display default-sized text at a size that is comfortable for that user, but your HTML says to reduce the text size from the user's chosen text size.

See Web Browsers, Email & HTML Fonts for an explanation of how HTML font sizes work and how reducing the font size breaks things,

Details

For any text you want your readers to read (e.g., the main text of an article), don't ever reduce the font size from HTML's default virtual font size (<font size="3"> or CSS equivalents).

• Don't use HTML font sizes 1 or 2 (whether via absolute or relative font size numbers, or via <smaller>).
• Don't use CSS relative font sizing to make the net font size smaller than 100% of the default font size.
• Don't use CSS absolute font sizing.

If default-sized HTML text looks too big to you, change your browser settings so that it displays in a comfortable size, and then notice how reduced-size text is now uncomfortably small.

If you don't yet understand the problem, see Playing With Fonts Can Make a Page Hard to Read.

References

For more information, see: