Re: Redesign Styles Hypocritical

    Since I got quoted for great justice, I thought I'd pop in and 
contribute a few words to the thread.

At 4:48 PM +1100 12/1/09, Peter Moulder wrote:

>On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:19:05PM -0600, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>
>>  I note that Eric Meyer does not choose sides in the author/user battle:
>>   http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/eric-meyer.cfm

    I should point out that the referenced interview is over five 
years old.  To be slightly more current, here's a piece from only 3.5 
years ago:
http://thinkvitamin.com/features/making-popular-layout-decisions/

>Unfortunately, he doesn't go into what the drawbacks of non-px
>font-sizes are, but at least it's evidence that an acknowledged expert
>thought that there were some drawbacks back in 2004.

    Even earlier than that, actually.  I've thought there are 
drawbacks to both absolute-unit font sizing and relative-unit font 
sizing ever since 1997 or so.  How I see this particular issue is 
largely summarized in the more recent piece I linked above.

    I will also note that both the interview and the article were 
written in a time before page zoom (as opposed to text zoom), so I 
might have a different angle if I wrote a similar piece today. 
Nevertheless, I think I probably hold to the following lines just as 
much today as I did in the past:

    "Any time a person tells you that there is one and only one way to 
size fonts for all sites, they're trying to hand you a philosophy, 
not a solution."  (WSG interview)

    "Here's my point: you can never satisfy everyone with your choices 
of Web design techniques. It is simply not possible."  (ThinkVitamin 
article)

-- 
Eric A. Meyer (eric@meyerweb.com)     http://meyerweb.com/

Received on Wednesday, 2 December 2009 15:38:15 UTC