Lothar B. Baier wrote on Thu, 18 Nov 2004 21:06:50 +0100: > Somebody buys a laptop with a 14 inch screen and puts it 1400 by 1050 > pixel screenresolution. Then he complains, that all of the text ist to > small to read. That reminds me of the man, who choose a two-seated > spider car because he likes it very much to drive fast with an open > roof. And than he complains about the designer of that car, because he > is not able to move his 5-room-houshold to the next city with that car > and has to rent a truck.
This not a good comparison. A laptop screen has what is known a "native" resolution. What that means is that choosing some other resolution, if that is possible at all to do, causes degraded rendering accuracy. Reducing resolution on such a display by some nominal amount, such as from 1400x1050 to 1024x768, causes a compounded effective resolution reduction. Nominally, going from 1400x1050 to 1024x768 is a resolution reduction of 46.5%, but doing that on a flat panel display produces degradation noticably in excess of 46.5%. > To clarify my opinion: On every computer I know, it is possible to > reduce the screenresolution to get bigger text to the screen. So, when > sobody with a handicap on his eyesight uses to set the screenresolution > to the max. possible, he should not blame a webdesigner for no longer > being able to read the text on a website. I design all my websites on a > computer with the screenresolution set appropriate to the size of the > screen I use. If the user does the same, he will be able to read, what > is written there. If not, it's not my fault. The problem is high resolution is designed for those who require high quality. People who pay extra to enjoy high quality don't easily accept the proposition that to improve some problem (font size) that they must discard the higher quality they paid for. What astute users of high resolution equipment do is adjust their own settings to ensure that high resolution does not shrink their fonts. Once they do this, their only problem with too small fonts results from web page designers who size in pt or px, disregarding user settings. IOW, changing resolution is not the correct way for a user to change font sizes. Depending on OS and software used, this is appropriately done by making some system wide settings change, or a software dependent preference change. Or, he could switch to a larger display. -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/auth/ ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
