Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 10/07/42 11:29

On Sat, 14 Oct 2005, news@celticbear.com wrote:

> Uhm, I'm just talking about the "normal" or medium, standard browser
> display settings.

How boring...

> I can't imagine being able to control exactly how the browser looks

That's the truth of the web. So why not adjust your attitude to the
reality? "Control" is something that you don't get. You get to make
proposals, which will be cascaded with the user settings. The harder
that you try to achieve this unachievable "control" of which you
spoke, the worse the consequences are going to be when it clashes with
the user settings, and thus: the more likely that the user is going to
need to completely override your proposals. So the harder you try,
the harder you fail.

> once someone starts playing with display settings on the client
> side, no?

There's something very telling about your use of the term "playing"
for users who are doing nothing more than applying standard features
of their browsing environment, and for their own perfectly good
reasons. You're designing a web page, not a glossy paper brochure.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that (say) 80% of users have
the screen "resolution" which you assume to be normal, and 80% of
users haven't changed the browser window size from its installation
default, and 80% of users haven't changed the default text size from
its installation default.

80% x 80% x 80% is around one-half. Continue to scale that with the
various other assumptions that you're making, and soon you'll be down
to one-third, i.e twice as many users fail at least one of your
design assumptions. It really *does* make sense to design flexibly.

By making flexible proposals, you optimise the chances for usable
results. You can do this without significantly compromising the
visual result for those who are in the mainstream browsing situation
that you had in mind, so it's a win/win strategy.

> In any case, I still can't see anything "wrong" with the CSS.

But that's not the point. Syntactically correct CSS (and HTML) should
obviously be a good idea, and gains points for technical accuracy, but
doesn't in itself produce artistic merit. To take just one example:
from the CSS /syntax/ side, pt units are technically correct, but
you'd find widespread agreement around here, and in the WAI
guidelines, that they are inappropriate for use in a general web
situation.

best

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