Px, Pt or Percentage?

hey all,

in your guys' opinion, what's best to use when formatting text for web? Pixels, Points or Percentage? And what is the advantages/disadvantages of each? Thanks in advance.

I'm just now starting to seriously dabble in web design but from my perspective, percentages are the best way to format objects because it ensures a level of consistency. Again, I'm just beginning to design pages so some one more knowledgeable may be able to give you a better reason for choosing one method over another.

yeah, im pretty new to web design myself. and after looking at other people's source code on their pages, they all seem to use something different.

Text for web should be formatted using points.
Graphics for web should be formatted using pixels.
Percentages should be used for structural elements like tables and such.

awesome, thanks for the info. one more question. when i preview my layout in safari it looks great. but when i preview it in explorer, all of my text formatting is gone, color, size, font, etc..... i know its a user issue, so i made all my font preferences in explorer the same as my layout, but it still blows everything out. not sure whats going on.... thanks for all you help guys.

What version of Exployer and on which platform (Mac/Windows)?

Also, are you using CSS or font/size tags?

I myself have found that text sizes can vary cross platform using points, so have started using pixels to specify type size

I prefer em because you leave the default size choice to the user viewing your pages and set offsets from that as desired. Still, web page developers could do something stupid like make their text so small that I have to then enlarge all of their pages. In the last couple of years I've noticed many sites making the text very small so that it looks pretty on their layouts. This is becoming very annoying. Sometimes I find the text size in these very threads too small. Hmm. Maybe age is catching up to me?

Here is a nice relatively short explanation; CSS Font Size Explained.