Font Size Units

I've always used points (pt values) for sizing fonts on web pages, e.g.:

body {
    font-size: 12pt;
}

Those of you who know me know that I'm a developer, not a designer (in the web designer sense; I design systems, but that's different). I couldn't visual-design my way out of a paper bag. (Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh.) I don't think I'm a one-trick pony, but I'm definitely much more left- than right-brained. The engineer in me says, I'm setting a font size, right? And fonts are measured in points, so I use points. Or at least, I used to.

Chris Coyier, on the other hand, is a designer. And he gives some good reasons even an engineer can understand why using pt values only makes sense for print stylesheets, not screen stylesheets. And apparently he's just recently been converting himself to using ems rather than pixels. Both articles are interesting reads.

Skipping the protocol

I just found out about this incredibly useful trick for loading absolute resources with either http: or https: depending on the protocol with which your page was loaded (to avoid those "mixed content" complaints from browsers).

Amazingly, you can just leave the scheme (protocol) part off the URL entirely. So for instance, if you're loading jQuery from the Google CDN with this path:

<script src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js'></script>

you can load it like this instead:

<script src='//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js'></script>

If the page that's in is served via http, that path will become

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js

If it's https, that will become

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js

E.g., it's a path relative to the protocol (scheme) but in all other ways absolute.

(Naturally, if you load a file via the file: protocol — e.g., locally — it will try to resolve that locally and blow up. But you don't do that, do you?)

Don't trust it? Neither did I, but I haven't found a browser in which it doesn't work, nor apparently have these guys.

And you thought you knew all there was to know about URIs...