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