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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 05/28/06 17:42
[f'ups narrowed]
On Sun, 28 May 2006, Chris Tomlinson wrote:
> I feel if it's good enough for the BBC to fix
> their font size, it may be good enough for me.
The BBC has rather an unfortunate history of web design.
As I remember their web pages in the early days, they were
inflexible, brittle, inaccessible.
Then they made a Big Thing of server-side accessibility features,
which would deliver a number of different variants based on the same
underlying content. Each variant was inflexible, but meant to be
usable by some particular subset of users. And the technique was
specific to their site(s).
This earned them some entirely unjustified bonus points in the
accessibility field, relative to sites that were offering a single,
flexible, design that adapted *itself*, calmly and quietly, reasonably
well to a range of client needs. A technique that can work, and work
in the *same* way, across the many web sites that a user will need to
deal with.
Remember, your readers spend most of their time on *other* web sites:
they don't want or need some viewing technique that works for your
site and only your site.
As time has progressed, however, and as the web has become (as it
seems to me) a more significant part of the BBC's overall media
dissemination strategy - rather than being a mere sideline of little
importance - they have been moving towards a more appropriate
flexibility of design.
It would be unwise to take your cue from one of their earlier
mistakes, rather than moving ahead of them as they move towards more
appropriate web design techniques.
> Do you have any simple line I can add to the HTML to emulate the
> fact that theirs doesn't change size (at least in IE6/7)?
I'm not sure that I exactly understand what you're asking for, but
whatever you manage to find, I have a user stylesheet waiting to
outvote you. But that doesn't excuse using authoring techniques which
a large proportion of users don't yet understand how to outvote.
Aim at flexible design - it works: work *with* it - stop hankering for
something that is badly supported, and only produces a good result
when it isn't working as you intend.
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