Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 06/07/05 01:07

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Spartanicus wrote:

> >I'm sure it's a perfectly fine choice for an individual to make in the
> >privacy of their own browser, and at a size of their choosing
>
> User setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.

Sorry, that doesn't rhyme. The user's choice is the user's choice.
It isn't "reduced" by anything. Sure: it's likely to be a smaller
choice than they would have made if they'd used some other font. But
it's still their choice.

> Author setting: Verdana reduced in size by a factor Y.

User's defence: the minimum font size setting (in a good browser), or
the "ignore author font settings" in the operating system component
that thinks it's a web browser.

Result: author loses essentially *all* the control that they were
trying so hard to impose.

> Result: Verdana reduced in size by a factor 2xY = microfont.

(On the basis of what you were hypothesising, that would be Y*Y,
actually.)

> Many find TNR and most other serif fonts not pleasant to read on
> screen @ the typical body text size.

Things are slowly improving. Some years back we could confidently say
that although, on a nicely printed page, serif fonts were acknowledged
to be better, nevertheless on a computer screen the greater
readability of sans fonts at low resolution meant that they were the
natural choice for screen display.

But considerable improvements have been made both in display
resolution and in rendering technology, so it's undergoing a
changeover, the way that it seems to me.

[...]
> This I consider bad advice, a IE user cannot
> specify a minimum font size.

Tools> Internet Options> General> Accessibility

[/] "Ignore font sizes specified on web pages"

(Various other options available there.)

Now I can confidently sit back and wait for the usual chorus of
"IE users never change anything".

The puzzle is this. Those folks keep claiming that IE users browse in
fullscreen mode, but I've never seen an IE installation that wasn't
windowed at installation time. If IE users really *do* never change
anything, as they keep claiming, then clearly that can never happen.

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