On 4/23/2014 6:19 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 05:32:00PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
I certainly won't disagree that small fonts can be hard to read, but
on the other end, I've seen a lot of newer websites with gigantic
fonts, and I find that painful to read as well.
Any examples?
Ugh, actually I wish I had some. I tend to run away from those sites too
quickly to either remember them or bookmark for later ridicule. I should
start bookmarking them though, for fun :)
Another thing I've seen that makes things literally painful to read is
double-spacing. Double-spacing is needed in school so the instructor can
mark comments (Assuming schools even do essays in hardcopy anymore?).
Outside of school it just makes things hard to read.
Though I can't confirm, I always assumed such sites were probably trying
too hard to be typographically proper. Either that or they assumed
everyone was running on a 5 bazillion DPI monitor or some such.
Usually when I run into a site with (1) microscopic fonts, (2) giant
(often multicolored) fonts, (3) no whitespace, or (4) has more
ads/filler than content, my fingers have an almost instinctual ctrl-W
(close tab) response. Sometimes not even one word registers in my brain
before I move on to the next site.
Incidentally, ugly rainbow text is also why I set my mail client to
plaintext-only ages ago.
In fact, I'm of the arrogant opinion that websites should not specify
ANY font size except a relative size to the browser's default, because
chances are, whatever size you choose will look horrible on *somebody*'s
device. Browsers come with a default (and user-configurable!) font size
for a reason. Web designers would be foolish to disregard that.
I agree. Unfortunately though, browsers haven't always has reasonable
defaults, so people had to work around, so now it's all pretty much screwed.
Maybe what we need is a CSS for "sane-size-defaults: on;" which would
provide a "reboot" of the whole default font sizes. That way, any pages
that still assume the old broken defaults system and actively work
around it won't break, but newer sites could finally start relying on
sane user/browser/device-specific defaults.
Grey-on-white is ridiculously common and should be jailable offense.
I'll never understand the the reasoning behind that readability
destroyer.
Worse yet, I've actually seen sites that use red on gray (or the other
way round -- it's too painful to recall). Or lime on turqoise. Or any of
various other horrible combinations. Aughh... my eyes hurt just thinking
about it... On the bright side, most sites that pick such colors usually
don't have any useful content to offer either, so the ctrl-W kneejerk
(fingerjerk?) fixes the problem quite quickly.
From what I've seen, most of those really weird-colored ones were cases
where I wouldn't necessarily expect the author to be good with styling.
But grey-on-white gets used even by sites that *should* know better.
GitHub was pretty bad with that a couple years ago.
Of course, I am aware that #000000/#FFFFFF can be a bit too much
contrast, so you often want something that's just a really dark grey.
But still, a lot of sites take the softened-contrast thing too far.
