Length
The length refers to the size of elements in HTML and CSS. There are many ways to set lengths. In this section, we'll explain six key lengths which are frequently used in CSS. We'll explain sizing-related CSS properties in more detail in the next chapter.
px
px
(pixel) is used to define the length of elements in absolute pixel size. px is not dependent on the root element (HTML element), the parent element, or the viewport size; px
can be useful when you want to fix the size of elements regardless of the browser's viewport size.
em
em
defines the length of elements relative to the font size of the parent element. em
is usually used to define font size. When the parent's font size changes, the font size defined in em
will change proportionally. Due to this dependency, em
is used in the specific design element that you want to keep in proportion to the parent element. For usual cases, rem
is more commonly used for font size settings.
rem
rem
defines the length relative to the font size of the root html element. rem
is usually used to define font size. As rem
is independent of the parent element, managing font size with rem
can be simpler than managing font size with em
because rem
does not require creating many font size variations in the same HTML document. Thus, rem
is preferred for font size setting.
%
%
is used to define the length of elements relative to the parent element. %
is often used for layout sizing.
vw and vh
vw
(view width) and vh
(view height) are used to define the length of elements relative to the browser's viewport size. Viewport is the area where a browser renders web content like shown in the illustration below.
100vw
and 100vh
are the same size as the browser's viewport size. 50vw
or 50vh
is 50% of the viewport width or viewport height respectively. As the sizes defined by vw
or vh
dynamically change depending on viewport size, vw
and vh
are used for responsive design.