--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Kathy Wheeler <kat...@home.albury.net.au> wrote:
> Looking at major general news sites, popular public > blogging etc > sites, they ALL seem to have fonts set much smaller. This > being the > case surely the visually impaired surfer, being otherwise > perfectly > normal individuals frequenting popular public news, > blogging, social > sites etc, will have already set their font preferences to > suit those > sites they frequent. Kathy, I sympathise: it's difficult to get over the 'small is cool' mindset that seems to be prevalent nowadays. Even on respectable 'design sites', I very rarely see body text at my browser's default font size. I've chosen to design my personal site around the default size, so I hardly use the font-size CSS property at all - only percentages greater than 100 for headings, etc. It's very tempting to use a smaller font somewhere, but I'm holding out for the moment. My target audience is probably 'better sighted' than the general public, but I've chosen to go this way to also handle different resolutions which, as others have pointed out, make font-sizing a very tricky thing. I don't think browsers help - the general features such as page zoom / text zoom / minimum font size are pretty poorly implemented, IMO (see http://www.fiveminuteargument.com/blog/minimum-font-size, for example). Combined with poorly chosen font sizes, I really sympathise with anyone whose eyesight is worse than mine. Having said all that, I don't think we need to be too dogmatic about it. Web pages are NOT the same as books - I believe there should be more of a visual identity to a site than just a logo and a couple of images. If browsers did a better job of handling font-sizing, every web site could easily be readable by all whilst maintaining a unique look of its own, even in regards to the 'base' font size. - Bobby ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
