Re: Proportional fonts

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, August 3, 2003 at 13:04:53 (+0200), Sébastien Pierre wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Proportional fonts
>
> That's on purpose... I really like this 80% size of better than 100%, 
> but I know it can't satisfy everybody.

But that's the whole point of strictly using the defaults and only using
porportional font changes in the first place.

You can configure your browser to use a smaller font size by default and
someone with a fuzzy old screen like mine can choose a larger font size
by default and we'll both be happy.

However as-is your new web page appears different on my screen than
every other simple web page I might look at, and that's not good because
that difference makes it a lot harder to read.

You will only frustrate your readers if you force them to adjust the
font size manually to compensate -- even if their browser gives them a
relatively quick and painless way of doing so.  I may not be a web page
designer by trade but I do an awful lot of research on the WWW for
technical information and you really do not want to know the things I
think of so-called designers who "purposefully" make my daily reading on
the WWW much less pleasurable than it could be.  Unfortunately this
trend to try to tightly control presentation in a medium that was
originally designed to explicitly prevent such control seems to still be
on the increase and I'm often driven to use a text-only browser just to
avoid this kind of unnecessary nonsense (though sometimes I do that
simply so I can use my primary paper-white hi-res monochrome display
where modern GUI browsers are useless because their designers focused
too much on colour for all their silly UI widgets).


> That's the hard task of 
> designing a page: I have to make choices, and as with any choice, some 
> people like it, some don't.

This is one choice you really must not make -- you must leave the choice
of default font size _entirely_ up to the user.  You must not try to
pretend that the user has chosen a font size 80% smaller than his actual
chosen default.  If you want to see 80% smaller fonts on your primary
display screen then you should configure your browser to use a suitable
default font -- but don't force that choice on all your readers.

When the goal of to disseminating information to the widest possible
audience the designer must try very hard to avoid building in his or her
own personal preferences when it comes to things like font face, font
size, and even colours.  Many layout options cannot be used either as
their use will make a web page totally unreadable in some environments.
I could be forced to do unspeakable things to web page designers who
resort to using images to present text (such as menu buttons) just
because they want to force their choice of font face or whatever on me,
especially when they do so without providing well tested ALT tags,
though even then the binary choice of using a text-only browser vs. a
highly personalized graphical browser is not one you want to force on
your readers.

As a web page designer who is working on a web page which needs the
widest possible audience you should be looking at designing your
documents in such a way that they'll get the best possible presentation
regardless of font and font size and even colour -- i.e. content is
king.  Although you may do a little extra to try to get the best
possible appearance and layout for common browsers with their default
settings, you shouldn't make any assumptions about the browser
environment or the display and you should be very careful not to make a
document less accessible to one person just to make it look better to
any other person (including yourself), even if you think what you've
done will benefit the majority of potential readers.  A really well
designed web page will be equally useful to someone with a cell phone or
PDA as it is to someone with the largest and highest resolution display
imaginable.

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <address@hidden>
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