Re: Summarizing the "font-size" issue to make an informed choice

Eric A. Meyer wrote:

> >    In my opinion, you've fairly well summarized the situation and the 
> > choice.  I have one semi-small problem, and that's with the W3C's QA 
> > font-size page.  For example, it starts out:

> > "The problem here is a basic usability and accessibility issue: a good 
> > design should look good without requiring the user to enlarge or 
> > reduce the text size."

> >    That is quite literally impossible to assure in all cases, for the 
> > reasons you summarized in your mail.

Well of course! The best that can be hoped for is reasonable results in most
cases, and to that end the astute designer will test across a substantial
range of environmental settings.

> > The only way to make that happen 
> > is to get every last browser to include a required "set your preferred 
> > font size" dialog when the browser is first launched, and then wait 15 
> > years for all the pre-dialog browser installs to die out.

You're doing as so many have done before, applying personal value judgments
that most initial settings are inappropriate, and need changing. In contrast
to the web of last century, most today are reasonable to start with for most
users, which means less than most actually need to make this personalization.

This it not to say what you posit is not a good idea. It was proposed for
Netscape/Mozilla 10 years ago:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24846
-- 
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
other."                      John Adams, 2nd US President

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

Received on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 15:36:11 UTC