Font Sizes and UsabilityUsability Guru Jakob Nielsen: “Another example of harmful Web technology comes with the increasing use of style sheets, which let web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel. Unfortunately, many designers are using this ability, leading to reduced readability of an increasing number of websites.” What Jakob is really complaining about is that Windows versions of IE do not give the user the ability to change the font size when the designer has specified an exact pixel size using CSS. You can see this here:
If you have Internet Explorer on Windows, try zooming in and out (use the View | Text Size command) and you'll see that the top line adjusts while the bottom line does not. Why do designers specify exact pixel sizes using CSS? Well, because a rather influential web design expert Jeffrey Zeldman argues (in our opinion incorrectly) that there is no choice, and it's really Internet Explorer's fault. He's right, it's Internet Explorer's fault, but since 80% of the visitors to the average site are using IE for Windows, blaming Microsoft is not a good enough reason to torture people who are more comfortable with larger fonts. CityDesk's font size feature is old-school; it uses the “obsolete” but universal method of setting <FONT> tags with SIZE of 1 through 7, which can be zoomed in and out by users everywhere. Although CSS purists like Zeldman think you should never use retro FONT tags, the truth is they do work everywhere and provide better usability for IE Windows users, which is probably more important to most sites than CSS-political-correctness. |
