Re: W3C CSS Home Redesign RFC

Richard Ishida wrote:
> Smaller text

No. No. No.  For the reasons given by others.

> Brighter colours

I'm not entirely sure what "brighter" means here, but the pastel colours 
used on the main page are good design from a usability point of view. 
Saturated colours are distracting and can be hard to read.  That's 
particularly true against a dark background and can result in a neon 
look and problems with chromatic aberration (the eye's focus for red is 
not the same as that for blue).

> More concentrated set of links near the top 

I'm not entirely clear about this point, but I think the page is trying 
to demonstrate proper user of hypertext, rather than the segregated 
links or "click here" styles that are common on the web.


Going back to font sizes, if you are finding that the default browser 
font sizes are too large, I'd suggest one of the following applies:

- the browser's defaults are badly chosen;
- users have selected large sizes to try and compensate for the design
   fad for 7 x 5 fonts;
- there seems to be a problem with the whole concept of using point
   sizes for fonts in CSS when you start mixing CJK and Western fonts.

On the last point, the optimum font size for simplified Chinese seems to 
be at least 24 px, whereas 12 px gives reasonable resolutions for Latin 
fonts (corresponding minimums are about 12 px and 7 px, respectively, 
although at 12px, the Chinese characters are often badly distorted). 
That means that one really wants different default point sizes for the 
two types of fonts.  Some of the non-IE browsers do make an attempt, 
although they seem to guess the whole page language (which maybe because 
of a lack of lang= markup in the documents I see) and set minimum font 
sizes by language group.

With IE, I have, for several years disabled author font sizes because of 
the abuse of very small fonts.  I only override this when the page 
breaks to the point of unusability, when viewed with default font sizes, 
  and, of course, to check what the /Style page style sheet did!


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Wednesday, 14 November 2007 23:10:40 UTC