When discussing this with Sebastien and Alex in the past, I asked them to consider this issue keeping in mind users with much larger fonts (for accessibility reasons).  It wasn't obvious whether we always wanted do something like "large font is normal font + 2" vs. "large font is normal font + 20%".

The enum I can think of relating to size (base font, large font, etc.) was in hopes that people would never specify any sizes, in either absolute or relative terms, anywhere in the codebase, but always use one of these enums.  This would ensure we used a small number of distinct font sizes everywhere, and we could make a decision once about how to handle things like super-large system fonts and not have to decided on a case-by-case basis.  I still think that's a desirable way to go, but we seemed to move away from it (and away from accessibility) in MD when we began forcing font sizes to be exact numeric values.

see also  https://codereview.chromium.org/1689623004

Just so I understand, the font style enum of base, large, etc that is now deprecated and we need to decide wither we should be using absolute numbers or percentages when handling large fonts? 

We want to create semantic categories for font size, as you have already depicted in your typography spec sheet, so instead of "small/normal/medium/large" we have "normal text/Header text/etc". I think for now it's ok for you to continue to specify these in absolute sizes like 12, 14, etc., with the understanding that 12 actually means "default font size" and other numbers actually mean "default font size + (X - 12)". What Peter is suggesting is that we may want that to actually be "default font size * (X / 12)", but I think that's more of a question for accessibility to answer rather than design. 

Personally, I think it's better to stick with adding a constant because if people turn their font sizes up it's probably more that they want their small text surfaces to be larger/more readable and not because they need already large text to be exceptionally large.

+lpalmaro@ for feedback

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I think stuff discussed here is all covered by  Issue 691891