I was reading Sitepoint's Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird. He recommends a best practices technique for fonts. Beaird prefers to work in pixels to maintain exacting control over a design, but in order to avoid screwing IE6/7 users he resets the fonts with a percentage...

body {font-size:62.5%}

...so that 1 em = 10 pixels. He then sets all of his font sizes in ems to provide graceful webpage functionality cross-browser while maintaining the control he likes.

This sounds like a fantastic idea, but it's basically from 2006. Is it still current? Is there a better more recent technique?

I realize a lot of people are starting to bail on supporting IE6, but my bias is to continue to support it, and I believe IE7 is unavoidable. What are your thoughts?