Newbie question on browsers & font sizes...

[ALX]

I've just started creating a web page. I want the text to fit at various irregular positions alongside of images, so I used "position absolute" to position elements where they need to be on the page. (The floating layout seems a little too unpredictable to me...) I've noticed that Internet Explorer displays font sizes differently than Firefox does and this leaves blank areas on the page where Internet Explorer displays the font sizes smaller than Firefox does. It seems that the Visual Web Developer IDE displays the page closer to how Firefox does than to Internet Explorer. How do real websites deal with the variations on how different browsers display text...?

 

[zoller]

Floating element's are perfectly predictable. You may find it helpful to insert <div style="clear:both;"></div> after setting up floating elements to stop your next element being affected by the floating elems before it.

Have you looked at using 'em' to set font sizes?

Personally I rarely use absolutely positioned elements.

 

[hericles]

I agree. I would avoid absolute positioning and find a better way. Depending on exactly what you want to do is placing extra divs around the images and text an option? Then you could use relative positioning and margins within the div to place text in relation to its matched image.