2 Abstraction Spend some time on web design newgroups or mailing lists, and you'll find some common words and ideas repeated time after time. Indeed, the word control turns up with surprising frequency. Designers are all knowing, and will not tolerate anything less than a rendering on every browser that is pixel perfect with the rendering on their own machine. Of course, this exaggerates the case, but not greatly. And if you are a Mac user, you will be acutely aware of just how many really major sites abuse style sheets to make their pages illegible.
Chances are they are using pixels or points as a measure of font-size.
I believe it flows from the medium of print. In print the designer is god. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page. A crone, hard and stiff. So softness and tenderness are attributes of life, And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death.