why can't you scale text by percentage of the container it is in?

[upside]

i've tried to get my head around this one.

 

[chrishirst]

by percentage of the container it is in?

Scale it from what dimension??

 

[Phreaddee]

I think he is still bitter about the iframe...
http://www.webdesignforum.com/18730-scale-contents-iframe.html

 

[upside]

x-height

(as in height of the lowercase x)

 

[chrishirst]

Font size is an inheritable property so the relative size of the font in any element is determined by the cascade from the elements first ancestor where a fixed size was specified.
Relative dimensions such as em,ex are determined from the cascade so 1ex is the height of an uppercase 'X' in the font face, family and the inherited size of any given element.

If no fixed font size exists in the cascade the font size that applies to the body element is used to calculate the relative dimensions.