Why? Historical reasons. Early websites typically used 12px text or smaller, because on a 640x480 (VGA) or 800x600 (SVGA) screen that was readable but not too b

Why? Historical reasons. Early websites typically used 12px text or smaller, because on a 640x480 (VGA) or 800x600 (SVGA) screen that was readable but not too big, and that stuck even as screen resolutions got higher. Though to be fair, people have been complaining about too small fonts forever. Browser defaults were 16px, but designers hated that and always wanted 11–12px body text. One thing I used to hassle designers about in the early days of web dev was how they wanted their designs to respond when users resized the text. Early browsers did text-zoom instead of page-zoom, so layouts would often break when users resized the text.