"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:hspj3m$1c9...@digitalmars.com... > > People often say it doesn't look professional. I agree it could probably > use better colors, etc. But for this kind of web site, I think it's just > wrong to use flash, javascript, or anything that takes a long time to > load. I don't like pages that have a tiny bit of content surrounded by > acres of flashy, blinky, hovering advertisements. I don't like websites > that sacrifice readability in favor of a "look". I don't like web pages > that refuse to reflow if the window size is changed. The site should print > properly, and be mechanically convertible to a reasonably decent looking > pdf. > > The site needs to be friendly to search engines, and usable by screen > readers. Yes, there are blind programmers, and at least one blind D > programmer. It's obnoxious to make a site they cannot use. > > I'm also old, and just don't like sites that use small fonts, cute fonts, > blurry fonts, fonts with poor contrast, etc. They're hard, even painful, > to read. When I was a kid writing letters to my aged relatives, my mom > told me that they'd struggle to read typical handwriting, and that it's > nice to use a typewriter instead. I always remembered that advice, and > when I started using word processors for letters, the ones I'd send to > them I'd always enlarge the font quite a bit. Web sites should avoid > setting specific font sizes, so low vision users can enlarge it. >
I agree a lot with most of this, but any web browser that doesn't scale so-called fixed-size fonts when zooming has a broken, archaic zoom function, period. > I recently completed a revamp of the digitalmars site that got rid of the > table based layout in favor of using floating CSS layout. The result looks > a bit nicer, and the printing should be much better. > Speaking as a web developer, I've found that floating CSS is irritatingly gimped compared to tables when trying to adjust how things flow upon resizing. (Speaker as a web user, I've never cared one bit whether a site used floating CSS vs tables.)
