What is the value of the css 'ex' unit?

Question

(Not to be confused with Xunit, a popular .Net unit testing library.)

Today in a fit of boredom I started inspecting Gmails dom (yes, I was very bored).

Everything looked pretty straight forward until I noticed an interesting specification on the widths of certain elements. The illustrious googlites had specified a number of table cols using the rare 'ex' unit.

width: 22ex;

At first I was stumped ("what's an 'ex'?"), then it came back to me: I seem to remember something form years ago when first I was learning about css.

The ‘ex’ unit is defined by the font’s ‘x-height’. The x-height is so called because it is often equal to the height of the lowercase "x". However, an ‘ex’ is defined even for fonts that don’t contain an "x".

Well and good. But I've never actually seen it used before (much less used it myself). I use ems quite commonly, and appreciate their value, but why the "ex"? It seems much less standard a measurement than the em, and far less useful.

One of the few pages I found discussing this topic is Stephen Poley's http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/emex.html. Stephen makes good points, however, his discussion seems inconclusive to me.

So my question is: What value does the 'ex' unit lend to web design?

(This question could be tagged subjective, but I'll leave that decision to more experienced SO'ers than myself.)

Answer 1

The value of having it in the CSS spec, if that's what you're really asking, is exactly the same as the value of having the em unit.

It enables you to set fonts to relative sizes.

You don't know what my base font size is. So one good strategy for web design is to set font sizes which are relative, rather than absolute; the equivalent of "double your normal size" or "a little smaller than your normal size" rather than a fixed size like "ten pixels".

Answer 2

Another thing to consider here is how your page scales when a user ups or downs their font size (perhaps using ctrl+mouse wheel (windows)).

I have used em with.. padding-left: 2 em; padding-right: 2 em;

and ex with padding-bottom: 2 ex; padding-top: 2 ex;

Thus using a vertical unit of measure for a vertically scaling property and a horizontal unit of measure for a horizontally scaling property.