On 9 Aug 2007, at 07:27, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2007/08/07 20:38 (GMT+0100) Alastair Campbell apparently typed:
You could take Jacob Neilsons finding that small fonts were the most
popular 'mistake' as proof that people don't know how to change their
settings
Or you could take it as proof that web designers as a group have
perfect
vision, and fail to understand normal web users as a group do not have
perfect vision, resulting in fonts on web pages just right for most
web
designers and too small for most others.
or it could be, that a lot of designers don't have perfect eyesight,
wear glasses and when sites were designed for 640x480 wanted to cram
as much message into the "above the fold" area as they could so
reduced the font size to do so.
line length and readability have as much to do with the problem as
font-size.
I have poor eyesight and a huge screen, yet I still set my code
editor to a bitmapped font of 9pt so I can see a decent amount of
code at a time, the windows on my screen are generally no more than
800px wide.
"Millions of people cannot participate fully online because most
Web sites
are built for people with perfect vision and the manual dexterity
needed to
operate a mouse." http://xhtml.com/en/future/fixing-the-web-1/
millions of people cannot participate fully online because they don't
have Internet Access.
However, I do agree we shouldn't be preventing users adjusting font
sizes.
you did once post a useful method for setting a default on body that
allowed the use of ems, but didn't change the users browser defaults,
i can't remember what it was, though, was it set the body font-size
to medium? or just use 100%.
IE being broken requires some setting on body font-size or em sizing
will break.
what's the best pragmatic approach?
given that we can't (commercially) just let the browsers dictate font
and font size (as times new roman at default doesn't give you many
words per line and *is* hard to read) how best to set a font-size
that doesn't prevent users from choosing something else.
my view has been that those that need something special, generally
know how to do it and those that don't either don't care or can't be
bothered. e.g I find white text on a dark background difficult to
read, so rarely spend time on sites with a dark theme. Others I know
find black text on white harder... flexibility and choice are the
key surely?
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