alt Hacker NewsThis is bad advice. You should only use rem for text, e.g. font sizes and paragraph margins.
If the user is on a phone and has a larger default font size due to vision difficulties, making padding scale with the font size takes screen real estate away from the larger text the user needs.
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TonyStr • today at 10:52 AM
This is true. I use increased font size on my phone, and so many websites are borderline unusable because of massive unnecessary padding. But I am also a culprit of using rem for everything. What is the alternative? Pixels?
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Thanks for the tip. That does make sense, although I do think having your default CSS-defined font sizes (across your whole app, not just the main content) be a reasonable size should be the first priority.
Also, not having ridiculously oversized margins, like so many 2019-2022 websites trying to look "modern" used to use.
old.reddit.com is one example where the paddings still look good when magnification is set to 150-170% (which I have to do because of the tiny default font size). I think doing it that way but with better readability at 100% zoom, would be a decent solution.