Why does font-size CSS not work on iPad HTML emails?

Question

I'm working on an HTML email and have been running to a problem on the mail client on the iPad only.

It seems that setting inline CSS to "font-size: 12px" or any other size does not work on the mail app for iPad, despite the font-size displaying correctly in the Mail app for Mac OS X.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Webkit automatically adjusts font-sizes on the ipad for easy reading. This CSS fixes the problem:

-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

Answer 2

The WebKit layout engine automatically adjusts font-sizes.
As of this post, Webkit is commonly used in Safari, Chrome, Kindle and Palm Browsers.
Applications can also take advantage of WebKit.

The problem comes down to minimum 'font-size: 13px;'

A CSS work-around:
<style type="text/css">
div, p, a, li, td { -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; }
</style>

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One issue is when creating e-Mail Signatures, for tags may be over-written or stripped.
Please Note that inline WebKit Styling will be stripped out of Gmail's Web Client.