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what is the difference px,em and ex?
What are the differences between these web units? What are the pros and cons, and the appropriate time to use each of them?
px, ex, em, pt, %
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Samuel Liew
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2Several more good ones: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=em+px+pt – Pekka Feb 17 '11 at 23:44
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5I'm beginning to get the feeling we're here to do custom web searches, not answer questions... – mellamokb Feb 17 '11 at 23:46
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2@mellamokb: I got really lazy, so I wrote an answer instead. Wait a minute... – BoltClock Feb 17 '11 at 23:49
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px stands for pixels. Exactly what it says on the tin: each dot on your screen is a pixel.
ex refers to the x-height of the given font, i.e. the height of the lowercase letter x for that font.
em refers to the maximum height required by a font. It is a commonly-used relative font size because it is calculated based on the computed font size of an element (or its parent if inherited).
pt stands for typographic point, which is 1/72 of an inch.
% is the percentage relative to a given property otherwise inherited from an element's parent.
Note that em and % work the same way. Ems are something like the decimal representation of percentages, i.e. 1 = 100%, 0.01 = 1%.
You can find more units at the CSS3 spec.
BoltClock
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