Oh, the joy of html
I am beginning to develop a certain lasting loathing for weblogs. In particular, I'm developing a loathing for weblogs templates that reduce the size of all of the fonts on the page. Why? As a general rule, every web browser you might find (with the notable exception of browsers like lynx and its thousand young, which are text-based and thus don't have font sizes) comes with a handy preferences or options screen, which allows you to set the font size to a size that is comfortable for you to read.
"comfortable for you to read", that is, until you run into a weblog (and that would be all of them) where the very first stylesheet directive tells the browser to make the font one, two, or three sizes smaller. So, rather than reading the text at the size you might want, you read a teeny-tiny font that requires interrogation lights to read! It's particularly maddening when the template sets the font color, so you have teeny fonts that blend with the background, which is even more useful.
One solution, of course, is to jack up the size of the default font to much larger than you'd ever want to read, but that has the side effect of making the web pages that don't play the evil font game sound like B.Q.Gumby doing flower arrangement. Another solution is to (at least if you use a web browser that supports it -- powerwolf does, but Microsoft's big pile of security violations does not) is to set a minimum font size so that no matter how frantically the weblog templates try to compress the standard page font down to 1/2 pixel heights, they end up staying at the level you want to read. But that has the side-effect of blowing away the occasional cute css game where you want to make footnotes teeny-tiny, or set up a pretent official guide entry for one of your model railroads.
I'd say "just say no", but, alas, readable fonts are one of those usability things that nobody cares about. Perhaps it's time to write a moondonkey plugin that disables font size changes at the <div> or <body> level.
I'll do this in my copious free time, sometime after the heat death of the universe.
Comments
Well, I'd vote for "don't change the font size"; on TSFR, the commentary column uses whatever font size the browser provides, while the sidebar is all <font size="-1"> (I would use <font size=smaller>, but that just doesn't seem to work for me?); then when my eyes are feeling particularly elderly, I can just increase the font size via [edit]->[preferences]->[fonts & colors] and all the sizes grown themselves up without much fuss (at least until it gets big enough so that the sidebar text overflows the (unfortunately; I'm sure there are ways to correctly do em sizes on column widths, but it never works for me) fixed pixel width of the sidebar.
Comments are closed
I feel your pain. I care about readibility and have tried adjusting the font size in the CSS portion of my blogger template. The result? Looks great in Firefox, but font is twice as big in Explorer. It's been driving me crazy for two weeks now. I don't know much about HTML or CSS so I've been using a sort of hunt and peck method.
Sigh... I just want an attactive, easy to read, and somewhat personalized blog.