Re: Complex Menus

In article <1213281762.343625@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Morris <dlmorrisDONTSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Then
along comes along a site set to 100% and it looks odd compared to others
(or you have to adjust your settings). Is this just a pragmatic versus
purity argument or am I really missing something here?

You are missing looking at the issue from a social or game theoretic
perspective. What is not a terrible thing for one or two individuals to
do is not necessarily without bad consequences if a great number of
people do the same.

The most rational thing to do for users who have widely differing ranges
of what they find comfortable to read is to leave it up to them. No one
disputes this much, neither you nor your present advisors. The question
is how best to allow them to do this without hindrance* while at the
same time causing the majority of users not to have to do anything
special for your site and, very important, contribute to a rational and
principled professional standard for website makers.

It is not a simple matter because it could be seen by you, reasonably
enough, to depend on settling various questions of fact: how many
websites are there that use less than 100% for body text? How have the
world's website users responded to the variations in their Option
settings?

To take an extreme case for illustrating a point: Suppose that 95% of
web authors make with 75% size. And this remains steady for a number of
years. And further suppose that each browser gets adjusted for its owner
to read this great majority of websites comfortably. Now, it would be
pretty daring for someone to advise you to use 100% in this world. The
text would simply be too big for most people and it would fall on deaf
ears to say that they should adjust *their* browsers rather than that
the authors should get with the crowd. Such advice would look too
radical and utopian.

However, the situation is not so bad! The battle may not have been lost
yet. There are many using 100%, not because it looks perfectly good to
most people but because it is the right thing to do to stop the
situation getting like the world sketched above. The whole point of 100%
is that it is a percentage of the normal setting for the browser and the
normal is whatever the owner is comfortable with.

If the world I sketched before were to come about then 75% would be the
normal. The figure would have lost its meaning! 75% of what? Of some
complicated thing that has a complicated history? 75% of what it was
when browsers first were made and before website developers mucked
things up by all going their own separate ways and herds forming to
change the very standard itself?

-------------------
* Obviously, setting fonts in pixels is bad because it makes it hard for
users of some browsers to operate text size choices of their own. In
Internet Explorer 6, for example, an online essay will simply not go up
in text size (from the View menu) if it is styled in pixels rather than
percentages or ems. So, this is a clear case of not leaving it to the
users. This is not to say it would be inappropriate to size (say, large)
text in pixels for decorative purposes; neither the author nor the user
is likely to feel a need for any variation.

--
dorayme
.

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