Geodog

No tiny fixed fonts, please.

No tiny fixed fonts, please 

I want to endorse Scott Johnson's pleas to designers and bloggers not to use small fixed fonts for your <P>Body Text</P>. This really bugs me, and I have made comments or sent emails to some people when I found their blog unreadable, unprintable, and unchangeable. One of the people I sent mail to was Scott, and I got a very nice reply.

To my surprise he has taken up the issue and writtien a very nice blog entry on the issue, featuring in part my email. I thought that if he was going to quote my email, I might as wellquote myself  too, so here is my plea, as written to Scott:

Mail#1

Scott,
<snip>
P.S. A hint for your book. Most bloggers have their type size too low, and
have it fixed absolutely, so it is hard for people who aren't used to 
staring at tiny type on a screen all to read it. Your friend noopy 
http://www.noopy.org/bloghorn/ is a case in point.
 
Mail #2: 
Scott,
Sorry, I do seem to have been on a bit of a tear about readability 
recently, and your site seems to have borne the brunt of it.
I have Opera 5 with the banner ad installed and use it sometimes, although 
I must confess mostly to test out pages I produce. I love the tabs, similar 
to the ones in NoteTab. I've used the zoom function on it, but it really 
screws up pages sometimes, especially the display of graphics. I also tend 
to leave the "use user .css" stuff alone, so that I can test my own the 
pages the way the majority of (Opera) users will see them. I haven't seen 
the "little author/user mode toggle button" - maybe it is in 6. The real 
problem is that I have customized IE so much with add-ons like the Google 
toolbar, surfsaver, roboform, etc. that it would be very hard to give them 
up, much as I dislike MS. Plus, I want to see pages the way the majority of 
users see them.
At least I will download Opera 6 when I get back to my home machine - maybe 
it does better with the magnify feature.
Thanks for the notes. Keep on bloggin'. I'm just starting up mine, and I am 
reminded what discipline it takes to write something other than email every 
day.
Tim
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What a funny world of blogging this is. People quoting people quoting themselves. Still, I like it. Back to Politics.