Look up / figure out today's best practice in setting font-size

[jensimmons]

For years, we've been doing this:

html {
  font-size: 100%;`
}

as the best practice. That starts out most users with a default font size of 16px. But leaves the typography size easily changed with zooming.

What's today's best practice? Do UA files set font-size in px? Do they already set it to 100%, making this line of code redundant?

What is best today?

Every once in a while, someone revisits this question and writes up a blog post. Where are we at on this now?

[olach]

I think this was needed back in the days when IE6 was the latest and greatest. This fix was needed to prevent text sizing issues in that browser. Read more in this article:
https://alistapart.com/article/howtosizetextincss#section5

Tim Brown (@tbrown) writes in his latest book Flexible Typesetting:

It may surprise you to learn that declaring this font size on the root element is unnecessary. Browsers do it for us by default. They use readers’ default font size as the root font size, even if we do nothing. And what we’re doing here is essentially nothing. We’re telling the browser, “Yes, good job, keep doing what you’re doing.”

[tigt]

Nicolas Hoizey discovered a lot of browsers don't even set it at 16px by default:

Device / browser	Default font size
Opera Mini 4.5	13px
Palm webOS 2.0 & webOS TouchPad	14px
Opera Mini 7	17px
AOL 9	20px
Cybook Odyssey (e-book reader)	21px
Blackberry 6.0	22px
NetFront NX	23px
Kindle 32	26px

Respecting the browser default is ideal, especially since setting html { font-size: <whatever> } doesn't influence how rem (or em) are resolved inside media queries, Safari’s weird behavior when forcing text to be at least as large as a user-configured minimum, etc.

[jensimmons]

I removed

html {
  font-size: 100%; /* Is this needed? Define the best way to define font size. */
}

We can add it back in if we discover a current reason for it.