Web designers should know better.

Web designers should know better. The whole idea behind HTML was its universality. HTML should be environment-agnostic.

Many of the people who design websites had a problem with this. They prefer control to interoperability. In the early days, the David Siegels of the world used "single-pixel" gifs, images of text in lieu of the characters themselves, and other sleight of hand to try to grab back the level of control graphic designers exercise over printed material. Siegel told us that Creating Killer Websites meant mimicing books. Siegel named his company "Verso," which means left-hand page, a decidedly print-based term.

As presentation on the web matures, designers returned to purity of form. Better that pages be usable on screens large and small than look fantastic on one size of screen and crappy on others.

And then along came Cascading Style Sheets. I like being able to specify fonts and colors and what-not in one place rather than throughout a site. But I HATE sites that specify absolute font sizes. Why does a designer presume that I want to read fly-spec type or gigantic letters? Font size should be relative. Otherwise, a webpage is not user-friendly.

I like to sit about a yard from my monitor. This position leaves real estate on the front of my desk for papers, makes it easy to look at the redwood trees through the window, and keeps my brain out of the reach of radiation. That's my privilege. And when View/Text Size/Large is deactivated because the person creating the page I'm trying to view, the word "jerk" springs into my mind.

Posted by Jay Cross at October 7, 2001 11:23 AM | TrackBack