Is relative style design obsolete now?

[howa]

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

[Bergamot]

howa wrote:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

It will *never* be obsolete.

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

That's no excuse for poor design. Ignoring user preferences for default font size will only encourage inflexible designs that do not adapt well to variations in user settings.

BTW, my browser prefs would ignore any fixed font-size you care to set, unless it was sufficiently large. Would your layout then fall apart like so many others do?

--
Berg

[Sherm Pendley]

howa <ho******@gmail.comwrites:

Is relative style design, e.g. relative font-size: em, % obsolete now?

Of course not.

since most modern browsers now support automatic zoom in/out, even you
are using fixed font-size.

No I'm not, because I'm not stupid. YMMV.

sherm--

--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Ben C wrote:

The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of
IE) is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies
images and explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts
breaking.

At least on IE 7, zooming easily messes things up - and zooming upwards
enforces horizontal scroll bar. The latter is unavoidable in general when
zooming means zooming, but the former is probably just broken design. Allow
4 years to have fixed in an almost decent manner.

Zooming is indeed quite different from font size changing. For some odd
reason, many web authors seem to be very confused about this. Maybe this is
because the idea that fixed font size aren't a problem any more due to
zooming possibilities has most of the features of a successful meme: it
sounds pleasant, it sounds modern, it sounds technical, and it's something
you want to memorize and pass forward, since that makes you look cool,
progressive, and helpful. If you wish to preserve this illusion, don't you
ever actually try to _use_ zooming on IE when viewing a page designed to
play with tiny fonts and rigid and crowded layout.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Ben C]

On 2008-11-15, Jukka K. Korpela <jk******@cs.tut.fiwrote:

Ben C wrote:

>The point of "zoom" (in Firefox 3 and I think some recent version of
IE) is that it doesn't just change font sizes, it also magnifies
images and explicitly-sized boxes in an attempt to stop layouts
breaking.

At least on IE 7, zooming easily messes things up - and zooming upwards
enforces horizontal scroll bar. The latter is unavoidable in general when
zooming means zooming, but the former is probably just broken design.

On Firefox 3 zooming doesn't exactly mean zooming. The initial
containing block is still the size of the viewport so auto width blocks
fit properly with no sideways scrolling. But anything with the width set
on it does get bigger. So in practice you do get plenty of horizontal
scrolling.

Allow 4 years to have fixed in an almost decent manner.

I don't know what the solution is. Can you fix a badly designed site
with browser features? Worth a try, but not easy.

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On 2008-11-15, C A Upsdell wrote:
....

Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

I don't find this to be the case at all -- unless you have low
quality images. Many images, especially JPEGs, will scale without
much loss of quality, if any. Just make sure that any image that
will be scaled is of high enough quality that it _can_ be scaled.

--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
================================================== =================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)

[C A Upsdell]

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:

>Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

I don't find this to be the case at all -- unless you have low
quality images. Many images, especially JPEGs, will scale without
much loss of quality, if any. Just make sure that any image that
will be scaled is of high enough quality that it _can_ be scaled.

We may have to agree to disagree. I focus a lot on good page load
times, which means (among other things) small image files, which means
JPEG images whose qualities are *just* good enough: not good enough to
necessarily still look great when browsers mess with their sizes,
especially given that browser resizing does not maintain image quality
as well as (for example) graphic editors do.

But on some things it is okay to disagree.

[dorayme]

In article <gf**********@news.motzarella.org>,
C A Upsdell <cu******@upsdell.invalidwrote:

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:

Avoiding zooming images, I think, would be an important objective of
most designers: zooming images degrades the quality of images, which
degrades the perceived quality of the site.

I don't find this to be the case at all -- unless you have low
quality images. Many images, especially JPEGs, will scale without
much loss of quality, if any. Just make sure that any image that
will be scaled is of high enough quality that it _can_ be scaled.

We may have to agree to disagree. I focus a lot on good page load
times, which means (among other things) small image files, which means
JPEG images whose qualities are *just* good enough: not good enough to
necessarily still look great when browsers mess with their sizes,
especially given that browser resizing does not maintain image quality
as well as (for example) graphic editors do.

But on some things it is okay to disagree.

If it ok to agree to agree with you, may I say I agree with you Upsdell.
It is a difficult act to balance speed and quality in images. 'Good for
the size' specified is often better than 'better than the size specified
in case someone zooms it'.

Is there, or where is, a demo of jpgs that zoom well compared to ones
that don't?

--
dorayme

[Bergamot]

Ben C wrote:

>
Can you fix a badly designed site
with browser features? Worth a try, but not easy.

Not always easy, true, but definitely may be worth it on some sites.

Disabling stylesheets altogether often works for me, though badly designed sites tend to have poor semantics as well. At least text usually becomes readable.

There are also some specific sites where I'll invoke a user stylesheet instead of disabling styles. Those are few, though, because it's a pain to make site-specific stylesheets.

--
Berg

[Bergamot]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

Bergamot wrote:

>There are also some specific sites where I'll invoke a user
stylesheet instead of disabling styles. Those are few, though,
because it's a pain to make site-specific stylesheets.

Indeed, but it can still make sense to use a user stylesheet across sites.

I do have a few generic "bookmarklets" for quick fixes to any site, like changing justified text to left aligned, but I don't use them as often as I used to. It's just easier to turn styles off than to try and hack my way around a problem site. If the site is still broken after that I'll just go somewhere else.

--
Berg

[dorayme]

In article <gf**********@news.motzarella.org>,
pecan <pe***@NOSPAMrouxville.infowrote:

Is there an easy way for me to test my sites to see how it renders when
somone has a larger/smaller font?

Yes, just enlarge the font in your browser. In Safari, for example, it
is View/ Make text bigger menu. Command + is the keyboard command. On
PCs (no need for apostrophe here...), it is often Control + if I
recall...

--
dorayme

[Bergamot]

pecan wrote:

>
Is there an easy way for me to test my sites to see how it renders when
somone has a larger/smaller font?

In IE, use the View->Text Size menu options. CTRL+/- does a page zoom in IE7, which won't give you the results you need since it zooms all elements, not just text.

In Firefox prior to version 3 CTRL+/- zooms just text size by default but in Firefox 3 this does a page zoom by default. You can change this behavior in a hidden pref, though. Type "about:config" (without the quotes) in the location bar, then filter on "zoom". browser.zoom.full toggles the page/text zoom setting.

Opera has no concept of text only zoom, just page zoom, so you'd have to change the default text sizes that are buried in the prefs settings.

Windows Safari and Seamonkey still use CTRL+/- for text only zoom, though I believe Seamonkey 2 gives you the choice of text/page zoom in prefs.

BTW, text zooming isn't exactly the same as using a different size by default, but it is a pretty good indicator of what may happen at various sizes.

--
Berg

[Bergamot]

Bergamot wrote:

>
in Firefox 3 this does a page zoom by default. You can change this behavior in a hidden pref

I just noticed you can toggle text/page zooming in Firefox 3 in the View->Zoom menu. I don't use this browser myself, so never noticed it before.

--
Berg

[Hendrik Maryns]

Bergamot schreef:

>
pecan wrote:

>>
Is there an easy way for me to test my sites to see how it renders
when somone has a larger/smaller font?

In IE, use the View->Text Size menu options. CTRL+/- does a page zoom in
IE7, which won't give you the results you need since it zooms all
elements, not just text.

In Firefox prior to version 3 CTRL+/- zooms just text size by default
but in Firefox 3 this does a page zoom by default. You can change this
behavior in a hidden pref, though. Type "about:config" (without the
quotes) in the location bar, then filter on "zoom". browser.zoom.full
toggles the page/text zoom setting.

No need for the hidden pref, you can find it under View → Zoom → Text
zoom only

H.
--
Hendrik Maryns
http://tcl.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~hendrik/
==================
Ask smart questions, get good answers:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

[Jon Fairbairn]

dorayme <do************@optusnet.com.auwrites:

In article <gf**********@news.motzarella.org>,
pecan <pe***@NOSPAMrouxville.infowrote:

>Is there an easy way for me to test my sites to see how it renders when
somone has a larger/smaller font?

Yes, just enlarge the font in your browser. In Safari, for example, it
is View/ Make text bigger menu. Command + is the keyboard command. On
PCs (no need for apostrophe here...), it is often Control + if I
recall...

It depends whether Control-+ is "increase font size" or some
kind of zoom. If you look at
<http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/StyleTests/table-rows/(which
was an experiment that didn't quite work) in something
(firefox, opera) where Control-+ is a zoom, you get quite a
different effect from changing the minimum font size.

--
Jón Fairbairn Jo***********@cl.cam.ac.uk
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2008-04-26)

[Bergamot]

Hendrik Maryns wrote:

Bergamot schreef:

>>
In Firefox prior to version 3 CTRL+/- zooms just text size by default
but in Firefox 3 this does a page zoom by default. You can change this
behavior in a hidden pref

No need for the hidden pref

Guess you didn't see my reply to myself, about 1/2 hour after I posted that.

--
Berg

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On 2008-11-17, Bergamot wrote:

>
Hendrik Maryns wrote:

>Bergamot schreef:

>>>
In Firefox prior to version 3 CTRL+/- zooms just text size by default
but in Firefox 3 this does a page zoom by default. You can change this
behavior in a hidden pref

No need for the hidden pref

Guess you didn't see my reply to myself, about 1/2 hour after I posted that.

Probably not; Usenet is not a web site with a single source. It
takes time for messages to propagate throughout the system. Unlike
the old days when it could take days, messages are now usually
available everywhere within hours, if not minutes. But not always.
--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
================================================== =================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)