Browser and Text Size

Sunday, November 30, 2003

So maybe there is interesting stuff to read on the web, after all. Accessiblity matters, and a major concern right now is text size. If you browse my site with Mozilla (have you tried Firebird lately?), using keyboard shortcuts lets you quickly scale the font to however small you want. Me, I prefer obese fonts these days for reading those other great sites whose authors actually have something to say; but from an aesthetics angle, I prefer tiny Tahoma for the sugar-coated jerkdom that is my own site. For IE, the architecture-arround is a cookie-saved setting on the preferences page. If you browse with WebEdit.NET, the text browser, you can use Mozilla-style shortcuts.

Ideally, users would choose persistable font settings on a per-site basis (be it via CSS or otherwise), while web authors would make sure the layout is left intact. Of course, allowing for any ridiculous font size is (rightly) seen as too much a burden for average Joe ASP. The solution is to distinguish two types of areas on a page: some areas are for non-content like menus, logos, links etc., which authors design as they see fit with regard to aesthetical and technical considerations, and whose text elements' font size is not affected by any user setting; and other areas are for lengthy texts (content that merits renting web space), whose format users can adjust to their heart's content. This way, we can have the best of both worlds.