On Sun, 04 Nov 2001 06:34:40 -0800, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > Although I sent you a private message, I thought I'd address this aspect > here. With Netscape 4.7 even if I specify a specific font in the HTML > code, I can still set my preferences to another font face, and adjust > the size. From what you've written I gather that that's not always a > possibility with other browsers and systems. Is that correct?
Some browser's make it very hard to adjust to a page. Besides, do you really want people to have to ditz with their browser just to view your pages? I've politely complained to several webmasters because they did silly things like set the fonts to 10 pixels tall. Well, on a 120 dpi monitor, that's unreadable. Their response sometimes was "change your browser settings". Well, thank you very much, but I'm not going to do that for every site I visit. I spend eight to sixteen hours a day staring at monitors. I've spent a lot of time and effort tuning the "visual environment" of my computers. A site has to have some pretty compelling content to make me want to dump all of that work and risk the additional eyestrain. > I really want to put stuff up that's accessible to everyone, and that > was in my mind when setting up the page. But, if there's a better way > to do it than I've done it, I'd like to know about it. That's a great goal, but it either reduces how "fancy" you can get or it makes a lot more work for you. If you really want a visually rich site, then accessibility angle can force you to have a second set of pages with reduced content, for example, "text only", for those that can't make use of the "full" site. I generally create only one set, that has some graphics and colors, but doesn't go wild with them, and tries to avoid bad combinations, like red next to blue or green. There are guides out there on the Web for accessable site development. I can't remember the URLs, but a search on Google should dig a few up. If you want to help blind "viewers" out as much as possible, for example, you have to make liberal use of the ALT and TITLE attributes on tags so that their screen readers can do something useful for them with your site. You also have to be very careful about using absolute sizes for anything, whether fonts or tables or frames or columns or whatever. Layouts based on absolute sizes generally fare poorly when used on a display that's not exactly the same size and fonts as the one the developer was using. TTYL, DougF - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
