ASP.NET form designer & the DPI/em issue

Question

This issue is obviously bigger than I thought! Using the VS2008 form designer for web pages, it'd a doddle to lay everything out using pixels. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's very hard to use absolution positioning and anything but pixels.

So my webapp has developed nicely until somebody mentioned the 120DPI issue and I've wandered off into another field which I've managed to kind of ignore.

I'm the person who thinks if you get a bigger monitor, it's because you want to display more windows on there with the same size text, not make everything bigger because you're 40 and your eyes are playing up ;-)

Given that there isn't a way for the designer to lay things out in anything apart from pixels, is there is half way house? I'm not about to go through every inline style changing from pixels to em values. Sorry, but that's just too much work for a volunteer written webapp.

Is it okay to keep pixels for the layout of text boxes etc. but switch to using some percentage based system for fonts? Will that size correctly?

This is only a problem in IE7. IE8 looks at the DPI setting and scales the x,y,w,h values as required. I appreciate this is both right and wrong at the same time. IE8 now works correctly with 120DPI where fixed pixel sizes have been used.

Cheers, Rob.

Answer 1

Might I suggest using the YUI 'reset-fonts-grids.css' CSS from Yahoo, then you can use EMs as your units for fonts meaning the user's browser can decide how large or small to show the text.

Answer 2

Have you considered not using such strict control over your sizes? In general, you will probably find it much easier to specify as few sizes and positions as possible. HTML is designed to handle size and position dynamically. The less you specify explicitly, the more able the browser is to arrange the page as needed to fit the user's browser size and viewing preferences.

Anyway, if you really must make heavy use of fixed positioning and such, I highly recommend you not use the visual designers in visual studio. They are very much NOT up to the task. I'd recommend looking around for other designer tools that handle the WYSIWYG stuff better. While I'm not a fan, dreamweaver does a respectable job with absolute positioning and has at least some support for aspx too.