Elysia

Well then, we have a problem:
12px is minimum IMHO. And it's not relative size either.

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MK27

Yeah, as I said you do have the option of doing it the wrong way. That will override your default. However, it will not override your minimum. Notice there are three fonts specified in "order or priority", ending with sans-serif which is really a generic catch all. My system does not have "Verdana, Tahoma, or Arial", so I will end up with Helvetica, which is sans-serif. Too many choices for the muddle brained makes a muddly thing methinks. The combination of serif, sans-serif, monospace, italic, bold, color, and relative size is enough to create clear and consistent distinctions in any document. Beyond that, you are just being asinine. Most entire books usually use only three fonts (bold, italic, normal) in a few sizes. Of course, they are are specific (eg. "typeset in myface") but that is kind of besides the point. Plus, if you want a real fancy font for a title, you can just use an image and make it shiny, 3D, in 256 million colors.

I suspect this option exists becomes enough people have insisted on it, and they want something like a pdf or postscript file, the form of which is immutable. But that is not a good model to apply on the web, with the restrictions of the client-server setup*.

* me personally, I don't think the restriction is so bad. Fonts are for letters, letters are for words, words are for writing, writing is for CONTENT. If you are a bad writer with little content to convey, you are bound to be obsessed with "fonts" to disguise your air-head products as real work. Some people will be distracted by anything, no matter how inconsequential or irrelevant.

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stevesmithx

you are probably right, methinks.
For a background color of #101010 and a foreground color of #626262 which i think is used for the content part of the OP's website,

Juicy Studio: Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser


says that the font size should be larger. So now the question is, are you a bot?

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Mario F.

Do not get carried away.
A representative portion of the web is made up of carefully "drawn" websites that try to explore at most all aspects of presentation. This is true of many corporate websites including publicity, art, fashion, or games, to name a few. Many of these websites try to enforce very specific font choices so they can "visually work".

Meanwhile, and taking that aside for the moment, the decision to make of the website a visual experience is a legitimate one. Carefully planned fonts, and font sizes is perfectly acceptable as a practice, under this context. Web Standards aren't broken in any way because of this choice. At most, accessibility rules may. But this is a perfectly legitimate decision. And sometimes even a necessary one. Not that it matters though; No browser will stop render a webpage because the defined font wasn't found on the user machine.

As for the web standards themselves... anyone wanting to create 100% Web Standard obeying websites should be the one having their head examined.


Just because you decide to use an absurd example, that doesn't mean all cases of specific font usage are absurd.

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Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

MK27

There is nothing absurd about it and I guarantee that all of those "carefully crafted" websites to which you refer could be done *without* using specific font sizes, because many of them are. It may be that the programmer has to more carefully craft the site, treating it as a web document, and not a desktop publishing file. As I implied earlier, I do not have most of the "fancy fonts" installed and I fail to see how this makes any significant difference to the "visual experience". I am also quite thoroughly convinced that most of the programmers pre-occupied with specific fonts have neglected more complex programming because they can't deal with it. If you turn off "allow sites to specify their own fonts, overriding mine" for a little while you will realize how irrelevant all that was.

I appreciate the art* and I enjoy web programming. Once again WRT a bit of text, you still have

• font style
• font color
• relative size
• various forms of emphasis
• background color
• borders

* in which composition includes the concept of clutter, eg "myspecialfont 17"

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brewbuck

12 px (pixels) or 12 points?

Whether 12 pixels is too small depends on the DPI of the display device and the quality of the font itself. This is one of the reasons why specifying font sizes in pixels is completely bogus in the first place.

If you meant 12 POINTS, a measurement which actually has some physical significance, then again I disagree -- 12 point text is for children. It's a pointless waste of screen and page real estate and it makes me feel like I'm reading from a 4th grade ruled notebook. If you have vision problems, you can use the browser zoom feature, or install a local stylesheet as described below.

At any rate, since the site is using CSS the point is moot. You can install a local stylesheet which overrides the base font size entirely. That's the whole point of stylesheets. If you don't like the designer's choices you can override them.

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Mario F.

I could argue those websites could also go without any sort of presentation. What would that lead us to then? Or is it YOU get to decide when to stop?

The decision to make a website design depend on a specific font is made often based on practical and aesthetical needs. Practical, because the font style may help establish an environment or emotion and this is for some reason deemed important, or even because it follows the official guidelines (many companies use specific fonts in other media). And aesthetical,... because.

This in fact has been a limitation of the HTML/CSS combination. Contrary to what you seem to imply, the push is exactly to try and create a more structured usage to fonts on the web. Right now, there's only two options available to designers; Either get away from HTML/CSS and design using other technologies like Flash, or provide an alternative website. I can't blame anyone who decides against both.

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Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

MK27

All malarky IMO. The concern about using "our business font" is *beyond anal*. I have no respect for people who have nothing better to do than come up with "official guidelines" like that and I hope and pray I never have to work for them.

I do remember having this personality defect once (pouring over different fonts looking for "just the right one") and I am very happy to be over it now. There are many, many, many more expressive and significant ways to get creative with web pages. As I said, if you turn off "site specific fonts" in your browser you won't miss them after about 10 minutes -- except for sites which are nothing but a collection of dippy fonts.

The site you refer to seems to be recommending consuming more bandwidth just so the browser can download the proper fonts for a page. This will have to be optional, so fortunately I can disable that sad joke if it ever comes to pass.

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Mario F.

Very well. As you wish. I exhausted my arguments.

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Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

brewbuck

Well, I guess not all of us can be idealists sitting in our basements producing nothing of value...

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MK27

No, my room is on the third floor

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ಠ_ಠ

I'm on the 2nd, but I have really good shades to keep out the sun (It's like nighttime 24/7)

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asbo60

wow I never expected so many replies, and thanks for all the suggestions ill definitely be making some modifications.

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cyberfish

People are willing to wait for about ~5 seconds on average for a website to load. Isn't it easier for them to hit the "back" button than to change the font setting?

There are so many sites on the Internet now, that people get to be very picky (except for a few very important sites, for them).

For me, for example, I almost always hit the "back" button immediately when I see "Please view the site in Internet Explorer", even if most of them do work with firefox.

Likewise, when I see a site with small fonts, I hit "back", since that's 1 less keypress than "ctrl-+" (and "ctrl--" to change it back when I leave the site).

Rule of thumb - don't expect the user to change their browser settings (or change browser, or screen resolution, or browsing behaviour) to view your site. Most people view a few hundred sites every day. They don't have time for that.

If your site hosts the best pr0n on the internet, users MAY be willing to give you an extra 30 seconds. But when it's just 1 out of a few million search results...

MK27

HOW DUMB ARE YOU PEOPLE? You don't reset your settings. You pick a minimum font size and leave it that way. Permanently. I never see a font smaller than 22. Period. End of story. This is easy to understand. I already know I don't want to see 11p text. I don't need to "rediscover" this over and over. I don't even want to bother with 12 or 14 or 16, which is I believe the vBulletin default. But I see it in 22, just like I see every other site on the net.

My eyesight is perfect (and clue: I want to keep it that way), but I know people who are not so lucky who use minimums of like 28 or 30 pts. That is why *all* browsers make it *easy* to set a minimum size, and I promise there is a significant number of users who do. I'm kind of baffled and amazed that people who are software programmers are ignorant of this and twice as baffled that they seem to have such a problem grasping the concept.

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