RE: W3C CSS Home Redesign RFC

I know font size is a very emotive and polarizing issue, and I don't want to
get into an argument, but I should probably have provided more explanation.

The problem is that readability difficulties run both ways.

The reason I wanted a smaller size is that I, myself, find it difficult to
read the CSS page as it is currently.  I have to lean back in my chair or
lower the font size to be able to read quickly.  (Having said that, a choice
of font at a given font-size can actually help a lot too.) Also, I find it
difficult to synthesise information around the page if I can't see a lot of
the text at a time.

I just wanted to put my hand up for those who personally prefer (slightly)
smaller text.

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/

 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Woolley
> Sent: 14 November 2007 23:10
> To: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: 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 Thursday, 15 November 2007 09:06:31 UTC