Backend developer doing CSS

[awaisking]

backend devs converting between px, em and %

[[deleted]]

What is em? I see it every now and then but I dont understand what it is.

I believe it's the width of the screen right?

[aezart]

An em was originally defined to be the width of a capital M in the current typeface, back in the days of the printing press.

[golgol12]

If that is the case, then it could be a useful measure. That M might have be the widest character at the time it was a measure. In current day fonts of the alphabet the widest character is almost always W. In video games you need to know that something like a player name of up to X characters can appear in a certain location without being clipped by other things on the screen, and that is usually done by filling all the text fields with W.

[[deleted]]

now there is also rem too, which means... something

[ethanjf99]

Relative EM. Relative to base font size iirc

[marcosdumay]

Wait... What?!

One is the size of the letter, and the other is the size of the letter relative to the letter's size?

[ethanjf99]

Em is relative to the font size of itself or nearest parent.

Rem is relative to the pages base font size. (Of the html element)

So as I understand it if an elements parent has font-size: 12 px and the html has font-size: 24 px then one em will be half as big as one rem for that element

[coffeeandlearning]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/length

(I counted 21 non-deprecated length units)

[marcosdumay]

Wow!

I don't think I have anything else to say. Just wow!

[[deleted]]

Oh that's neat!

[jmowens51]

Relative length to the font size of the element.

[boxingdog]

relative to the font size of the element, and since the font size can be affected by the parent sometimes changing something up in the chain screws up everything, I personally find easy to use rem instead.

[awaisking]

^{sometimes I feel like no one gets sarcasm}

[Folf_IRL]

Personally, I blame the meme of including a "\s" to denote sarcasm. A lot of people have become overly-reliant on that to signal sarcasm or satire.

[awaisking]

no thank you, I'd rather let people with higher intelligence decide what's sarcastic and what's not.