Even outside of the web arbitrary absolute dimensions are rarely the correct way to do things. It means that your content/app/etc is rendering badly on some set of screens/form factors and usually breaks accessibility affordances like increased font sizes/weights and font substitution.
Meh. "Add a new breakpoint when things look bad" has worked pretty well for the web for a long time.
Also, all browsers these days just do a fancy page zoom instead of directly manipulating font size. It's a much better setup than what we had to do in days of yore, e.g. using different units on different properties so that things didn't fall apart on size increase.
> Also, all browsers these days just do a fancy page zoom instead of directly manipulating font size.
This is very not true. Hit Alt V Z T in Firefox, for example. It's even on WebAIM's accessibility checklist (https://webaim.org/resources/evalquickref/#scaling), which makes it important: that list is very selective.
Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 has at least three different kinds of zoom, depending on which input device you use to trigger it. (Multiple types of zoom: good. None of the keyboard / mouse / touchpad bindings doing the same? Bad.)
Uh, sure. Sort of a pedantic side note, but yes: all browsers' default to a fancy page zoom these days. It's even more buried in Chrome.
For good reason: using rems or ems in sizing values will cause "text only" zoom to do a good bit more than what's on the tin. WebAIM doesn't require it, and only recommends – which is more than I would say, at any rate. It's simply more trouble than it's worth.
