- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:34:02 -0600
- To: Brad Kemper <brkemper@comcast.net>
- CC: CSS <www-style@w3.org>
Brad Kemper wrote: > You draw an artificial distinction. Commercial authors exist to satisfy > consumer needs. No, they exist to satisfy the needs of the people paying them. These may or may not correspond with the needs of the people actually viewing the resulting pages. > Yep. And the good design of important sites can aid in usability, if the > author/designer took a lot of care to craft it that way The problem is that most designers take a lot of care to make the site usable in one very particular configuration or narrow range of configurations (combination of DPI, available fonts, viewing distance, viewport size, etc). This typically has the effect of making the site less usable in other configurations, with the usability becoming worse as you depart further from the configuration the site was designed for. Put another way, most sites are somewhat over-designed. The problem is that if you don't over-design a little bit the site ends up being sub-optimal for the majority of your users (e.g. all users get the same user experience and it's the one you'd get on a cellphone). But the amount of over-designing that goes on is generally much greater than that. Simply forcing font sizes to be at a readable level breaks many major sites if you use a somewhat high-DPI monitor and don't sit right up against it. > <sarcasm>Yes, clearly giving designers the choice of using color or > specifying fonts was a big mistake.</sarcasm> I think giving designers the choice of specifying font-sizes that are below the readability threshold, which they exercise every day, is unfortunate. Of course the problem is that they wouldn't even realize that their fonts are set that way in some configurations... The problems come when instead of doing layouts capable of flowing when things like font-size change the designer hardcodes sizes. Not providing the tools to avoid said hardcoding, and providing tools to enable it, is indeed a mistake. -Boris
Received on Friday, 4 January 2008 07:33:51 UTC