CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell
<p>The CSS designer for <a href='http://www.wordpress.org/'>WordPress</a>, the successor to the<br />
b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous<br />
rant.  In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said &#8220;But<br />
even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let<br />
you easily resize this?&#8221;.</p>
<p>This, I&#8217;m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.</p>
<p>In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every<br />
time to get the font sizes I want.  In general, answers of the form<br />
&#8220;you can override the designer&#8217;s preferences by jumping through hoops&#8221;<br />
show the wrong attitude.  This attitude clashes with the objective<br />
reality of lots of different display devices out there.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s also bad human-factors engineering.  As the user, <em>my preferences<br />
should be primary</em> &mdash; in font sizes as in all other things.  That&#8217;s<br />
how the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don&#8217;t<br />
get this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their<br />
own egos.</p>
<p>Ultimately they&#8217;re shooting themselves in the foot, too &mdash; think about<br />
what will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and<br />
the size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at<br />
the same time desktop displays go to 1600&#215;1200 and higher).<br />
Fixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger<br />
lose as time goes on.</p>
<p>To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather<br />
than an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that&#8217;s when your<br />
designs will have real and lasting value.  This is a hard lesson for<br />
artists to learn, but it&#8217;s the only way to avoid filling the web with<br />
designs that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display<br />
technology improves and becomes more various.</p>
