Re: Small print is not a good idea Re: Namespace

On Jul 17, 2007, at 7:57 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

>
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 03:10:48 +0100, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au 
> > wrote:
>
>> Robert Burns wrote:
>
>>> For example, in the US (and maybe elsewhere) such legal wording is  
>>> not supposed to be presented in "small print" so it is a bit of a  
>>> misnomer.
>>
>> Do you have any evidence/references to support that claim?
>>
>> Copyright statements and other legal notices that typically occur  
>> at the end of web pages (the use cases for which this is intended)  
>> are quite often presented in a smaller font.
>
> I forget the reference, but last I checked (about 3 years ago I  
> think) your home state of NSW had legislation that set a minimum  
> size for text which could be considered to be included as a valid  
> part of any legal agreement. Specifically, any text smaller than  
> 10px could not be considered an enforceable clause.
>
> While it may be common to present this as small text, there is a  
> (sensible, IMHO) movement in the legal world to insist that small  
> print is not a good way to present legal information. Although it is  
> easily overcome by any modern browser, having to increase text  
> manually to read this information is an inducement to ignore it -  
> and the legal argument runs that if you are inducing people to  
> ignore something you cannot reasonably expect them later to have  
> read it.
>
> Reducing the size of text is also an accessibility issue - again,  
> not insuperable, but an annoyance.
>
> For these reasons, I would suggest deprecating small as an element  
> primarily concerned with presentation. If an element is needed to  
> cover legal and similar information then a better one should be  
> chosen. Given that in general such information covers large number  
> of pages at a time, the use of a link and metadata, such as the rel  
> attribute, seems much more sensible.

Copyright and trademark notices generally need to be on the page  
itself. They need to be visible but not distracting. A link is  
acceptable for things like a privacy policy. This is the small print  
at the bottom of apple.com:

   Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.   Terms of Use |  
Privacy Policy
   Google, the Google logo, and Google Maps are trademarks of Google  
Inc. © 2007 NAVTEQ. All rights reserved.

"Terms of Use" and "Privacy Policy" are links. The font is 10px. I  
think this is entirely appropriate, and would be a good use of the  
"small" element (currently it's just two <p> elements in a div with a  
special id).

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 05:32:56 UTC