Re: Alternative Style Sheets

On 2012-10-15 11:22 (GMT+0100) Antony Kennedy composed:

> 2) Although it is possible to create a website that satisfies (nearly) all
> WCAG guidelines, and allows text resizing and is friendly to user
> stylesheets etc, this can be constrictive to design and not everyone is
> technical enough to fix these things (nor should they have to be). I'm not
> saying this is a best-case scenario – we should code to guidelines
> whenever possible – but in the real world, brand guidelines and
> design/client requirements do not always make this possible.

While WRT sizing technically true, as a practical matter false. It needs to 
be as difficult as possible to be bad. Authors need full latitude in design 
decisions with regard to relative sizes among all objects, but users need 
absolute control of the base size that the collective objects are relative to.

If the designer thinks everything should be a certain absolute size, it 
should be required of him to either adjust his own UA's base size 
accordingly, or incorporate the deviation in alternate sheets, not rudely 
imposing personal taste that forces users to apply defensive measures to 
compensate for designer rudeness as a matter of course.

The px unit WRT anything other than bitmap images or minuscule measurement 
(e.g. narrow borders or margins, or increments of letter spacing) facilitates 
badness. Its use needs to be curtailed. One way would be to limit its 
validity to optional/alternate styles. Another, make integer values of more 
than one digit applied other than to bitmap images invalid.

Any designer's bitmap of how a page is to look can be built to present the 
very same perspectives using relative units. Thus that's how they should be 
built, and not exclusively via alternative styles. If everything is "too 
big", the nose is too close to the screen, the screen is too big, or both. 
cf. http://informationarchitects.net/blog/100e2r/?v=4
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Received on Monday, 15 October 2012 12:47:45 UTC