Is Decimal Precision When Specifying a Font-Size Respected by All Browsers

Is decimal precision when specifying a font-size respected by all browsers?

Decimals are not rounded consistently in all browsers. The best post I could find is here: Browser Rounding

This contains a table that shows the following:

Internet Explorer 7 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 8 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 9 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 10    truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 11    truncate to 2 decimal places
Firefox 3.0 truncate to 3 decimal places
Firefox 3.5 truncate to 3 decimal places
Firefox 31  truncate to 3 decimal places
Chrome 20   round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 21   round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 37   round to 13 decimal places
Safari 6 (OSX Lion) round to 15 decimal places
Safari 6.1 (OSX Mountain Lion)  round to 15 decimal places
Safari 7 (OSX Mavericks)    round to 15 decimal places
Mobile Safari 7 (iOS7)  round to 15 decimal places
Mobile Safari 8 (iOS8)  round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 36 (Jelly Bean) [Nexus5] round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 30 (KitKat) [S5] round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Jelly Bean) [Nexus7,Nexus4,S4,S3]    round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) [Nexus,KindleFire2]  round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Gingerbread) [S2]    truncate to 3 decimal places
Opera 12    truncate to 2 decimal places
Opera Next 24   round to 13 decimal places

Is decimal precision when specifying a font-size respected by all browsers?

Decimals are not rounded consistently in all browsers. The best post I could find is here: Browser Rounding

This contains a table that shows the following:

Internet Explorer 7 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 8 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 9 truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 10    truncate to 2 decimal places
Internet Explorer 11    truncate to 2 decimal places
Firefox 3.0 truncate to 3 decimal places
Firefox 3.5 truncate to 3 decimal places
Firefox 31  truncate to 3 decimal places
Chrome 20   round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 21   round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 37   round to 13 decimal places
Safari 6 (OSX Lion) round to 15 decimal places
Safari 6.1 (OSX Mountain Lion)  round to 15 decimal places
Safari 7 (OSX Mavericks)    round to 15 decimal places
Mobile Safari 7 (iOS7)  round to 15 decimal places
Mobile Safari 8 (iOS8)  round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 36 (Jelly Bean) [Nexus5] round to 15 decimal places
Chrome 30 (KitKat) [S5] round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Jelly Bean) [Nexus7,Nexus4,S4,S3]    round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) [Nexus,KindleFire2]  round to 15 decimal places
Android Browser 4 (Gingerbread) [S2]    truncate to 3 decimal places
Opera 12    truncate to 2 decimal places
Opera Next 24   round to 13 decimal places

Are decimal pixels in css supported in multiple browsers?

Using decimal pixels is incorrect. Pixel should be a single dot on the screen. Therefore, size can only be complete with no floating numbers.
The decimal value will be used only when you will increase the zoom level and will be increased proportionaly to it.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/x2bdrdy6/
in the example above you can see that the 50.5px is rounded upp and equals to the 51px.

#body1{
  height: 50px;
  width:100px;
  background: red;  
}

#body2{
  height: 50px;
  width:100.5px;
  background: green;  
}

#body3{
  height: 50px;
  width:101px;
  background: blue;  
}

Using fractional em's in CSS's font-size property

JohnB is right. We're still rendering in pixels whatever the size unit we use, and small changes in ems will not change the displayed size:

For example, for text originally displaying at a height of 20px*, we can see that there is no effective change when a rule is added to make it .99em of its original height:

20 * 0.99 = 19.8 

The browser can't display .8 of a pixel, so (assuming it will round up) it will still display it as 20px high.

Though it appears that browsers do not always round off as expected:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/02/10/rounding-off/

http://ejohn.org/blog/sub-pixel-problems-in-css/

*Yep, I know a font-size of 20px doesn't alway mean it's displayed at 20px!

Are the decimal places in a CSS width respected?

If it's a percentage width, then yes, it is respected:

#outer {
    width: 200px;
}

#first {
    width: 50%;
    height: 20px;
    background-color: red;
}

#second {
    width: 50.5%;
    height: 20px;
    background-color:green;
}

#third {
    width: 51%;
    height: 20px;
    background-color:blue;
}

<div id="outer">
    <div id="first"> </div>
    <div id="second"> </div>
    <div id="third"> </div>
</div>

How do browsers deal with non-integer values for height and width?

Assertion

Browsers are designed to deal with floating point numbers and values less than one pixel.

---

To see a simple example showing that browsers use floating point numbers in their calculations, create a 3% width item and look at its calculated properties in Chrome developer tools as it is resized.

You should see something like this:

"35.296875" can't be precisely rendered by a display that maps one pixel to one pixel in the physical display (CRT, traditional LCD). However, newer high density displays use a different ratio than 1-1 and this fractional value could conceptually be used to provide a greater degree of precision.

Even on low density displays, a fractional value could provide a hint for subpixel rendering, which uses the red, green and blue components of the pixel to make the edges of an object appear smoother than possible with whole pixel values.

But exactly what the browser will do with such numbers isn't very predictable. You can't (currently) ask a browser to make a box 31.5px wide and expect a consistent or even meaningful result. Some browsers will truncate fractional values; others round up/down.

Subpixel rendering is commonly used for text and works quite well in most/all browsers, but each browser implements this differently and there is very little a developer can do to impact how this works.

When

At what stage do non-integer values get rounded in the inheritance
chain?

Most/all calculations are performed as floating point numbers and any rounding may occur late in the process, or even outside of the browser's control. For example, a browser may delegate its anti-aliasing to an OS component (such as IE9 does to Windows Direct2D and DirectWrite).

CSS transitions may be tightly integrated with OS and/or hardware acceleration. This is another case in which I think it is highly likely the floating point values are preserved by the browser and passed to the underlying layer(s).

Rounding Behavior/Errors

When a container's children have non-integer dimensions, will there
ever be instances where the sum of the child lengths or heights not
equal the inner width / height of the parent element?

I've seen this in older browsers (IE7) as a result of percentage calculations, where 50% + 50% > 100%. Usually it is not a problem until you try to do something more complicated. Anecdotally, I have seen "off by one pixel" bugs when attempting to precisely align HTML elements as part of an animation.

Percentages vs. other Units

Do provided non-integer dimensions get handled differently to
non-integer results of percentage-based dimensions?

Do they round to the nearest integer, or truncate them?

It varies. This older answer states that they are truncated, but (in Chrome 24) I see rounding (note the example fiddle). Note my earlier comment about the differences between Chrome and Safari on the same machine.

What about non-whole values for padding and margins?

The same rules (or lack thereof) appear to apply.

Standards

I haven't found a standard definition for how floating point values should be handled in all cases. The closest relevant spec I can find talks about canvas pixels:

The handling of pixel rounding when the specified coordinates do not
exactly map to the device coordinate space is not defined by this
specification, except that the following must result in no visible
changes to the rendering: [...list of conditions...]

Again, this is from a section dealing specifically with canvas, but it does insinuate:

• Browsers absolutely interact with fractional pixels.
• Actual implementations will vary.
• Some standardization does exist.
• Mapping to the device's display may factor into the calculation.

Should I use px or rem value units in my CSS?

TL;DR: use px.

The Facts

• First, it's extremely important to know that per spec, the CSS px unit does not equal one physical display pixel. This has always been true – even in the 1996 CSS 1 spec.

  CSS defines the reference pixel, which measures the size of a pixel on a 96 dpi display. On a display that has a dpi substantially different than 96dpi (like Retina displays), the user agent rescales the px unit so that its size matches that of a reference pixel. In other words, this rescaling is exactly why 1 CSS pixel equals 2 physical Retina display pixels.

  That said, up until 2010 (and the mobile zoom situation notwithstanding), the px almost always did equal one physical pixel, because all widely available displays were around 96dpi.

• Sizes specified in ems are relative to the parent element. This leads to the em's "compounding problem" where nested elements get progressively larger or smaller. For example:

    body { font-size:20px; } 
    div { font-size:0.5em; }
  

  Gives us:

    <body> - 20px
        <div> - 10px
            <div> - 5px
                <div> - 2.5px
                    <div> - 1.25px
  

• The CSS3 rem, which is always relative only to the root html element, is now supported on 99.67% of all browsers in use.

The Opinion

I think everyone agrees that it's good to design your pages to be accommodating to everyone, and to make consideration for the visually impaired. One such consideration (but not the only one!) is allowing users to make the text of your site bigger, so that it's easier to read.

In the beginning, the only way to provide users a way to scale text size was by using relative size units (such as ems). This is because the browser's font size menu simply changed the root font size. Thus, if you specified font sizes in px, they wouldn't scale when changing the browser's font size option.

Modern browsers (and even the not-so-modern IE7) all changed the default scaling method to simply zooming in on everything, including images and box sizes. Essentially, they make the reference pixel larger or smaller.

Yes, someone could still change their browser default stylesheet to tweak the default font size (the equivalent of the old-style font size option), but that's a very esoteric way of going about it and I'd wager nobody¹ does it. (In Chrome, it's buried under the advanced settings, Web content, Font Sizes. In IE9, it's even more hidden. You have to press Alt, and go to View, Text Size.) It's much easier to just select the Zoom option in the browser's main menu (or use Ctrl++/-/mouse wheel).

^{1 - within statistical error, naturally}

If we assume most users scale pages using the zoom option, I find relative units mostly irrelevant. It's much easier to develop your page when everything is specified in the same unit (images are all dealt with in pixels), and you don't have to worry about compounding. ("I was told there would be no math" – there's dealing with having to calculate what 1.5em actually works out to.)

One other potential problem of using only relative units for font sizes is that user-resized fonts may break assumptions your layout makes. For example, this might lead to text getting clipped or running too long. If you use absolute units, you don't have to worry about unexpected font sizes from breaking your layout.

So my answer is use pixel units. I use px for everything. Of course, your situation may vary, and if you must support IE6 (may the gods of the RFCs have mercy on you), you'll have to use ems anyway.

1.9px text size shown as 1px - Raphael SVG, CSS, Javascript

All browsers doesn't support for decimal places when you define the width in pixels. In chrome the decimal places are truncated and thus 5.5px or 5.6px becomes 5px. Some browser displays this without truncated.

The width will be rounded to an integer number of pixels.

I don't know if every browser will round it the same way though. They all seem to have a different strategy when rounding sub-pixel percentages. If you're interested in the details of sub-pixel rounding in different browsers, there's an excellent article on ElastiCSS.

Even when the number is rounded when the page is painted, the full value is preserved in memory and used for subsequent child calculation. For example, if your box of 100.4999px paints to 100px, it's child with a width of 50% will be calculated as .5*100.4999 instead of .5*100. And so on to deeper levels.

more about on this q/a

Calculating an em value -1px in CSS/SASS without assuming the user's default font size

No, you cannot. The only way you can perform arithmetic operations with incompatible units like em and px is via calc() in CSS (not Sass), and that is not allowed in media queries.

You can use the largest possible decimal (based on your precision settings) that is smaller than a specific value.

// default precision in Sass is 5 decimal places
// go any bigger and Sass will round up
@media (max-width: 34.99999em) {
    body {
        background: red;
    }
}

@media (min-width: 35em) {
    body {
        background: green;
    }
}

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