kchayka said:
And how, pray-tell, do you distinguish between those who intentionally
set this different font size and those who didn't? Or do you think the
more clueful user will just have to figure out how to deal with your
poor choices? I suspect the "back" button will be rather handy in these
cases.
As I mentioned in the previous post: people with visual impairdness would
surely set their browsers to ignore font settings of websites (or they use
screenreaders).
At the expense of usability and/or accessibility, no doubt, plus it
frequently ends up as a fragile layout that easily falls apart. You
must be new around here, or you would have already read the myriad of
posts and reference sites regarding the ills of fixed designs, the web
is not DTP, etc. If both you and your client are shooting for form over
function, then your client probably isn't getting their money's worth.
Trust me, I know the discussions on accessibility well enough. I have also
studied the opinions on limitations of web design long enough to tell you
that there may be rules but also exceptions to the conception that web
design has to be flexible for different resolutions.
All I wanted in this post was to know whether somebody noticed a difference
between XP browser and others, but it seems you are much keener on starting
a discussion on accessibility/usability and web design which I am happy to
join you for a while:
In my opinion you have to be extremely narrow-minded to take it as a rule
that web design cannot be treated the same as DTP! Of course we are talking
about a different medium here and in the majority of cases I agree that a
flexible design is the appropriate solution. However, in the majority of
cases a flexible design breaks all the rules of graphic design! The
positioning of elements and content to eachother is not just a rough
estimation in which the designer says: "Ah well, I will just bash this image
on to the right of the text, no matter whether it is moved further over in
the course of the website on bigger browser windows". Unfortunately there is
more to a good design. The problem in the web is that a planned design can
be limitated by browser- or client-specific characteristics.
Many Web Developers see their job as an advisory role in which they tell the
graphic designers that everything they have learnt so far is not applicable
to the web and that they have to live with the fact that the design will
move in the long run. I myself am accustomed to telling this to designers.
However, this is not always the correct approach to follow. If a target
audience has been analysed and set to follow certain characteristics, the
design and development of a website can be set up to address these
characteristics.
Which leads us directly into a new discussion and I am sure all of you will
be happy that I address this topic:
SHOULD WEBSITES BE GLOBALLY ACCESSIBLE?
I say yes. This means the content can be read and the site can be navigated.
SHOULD WEBSITES BE GLOBALLY USABLE?
This is an interesting one. So we have established a target audience and we
have addressed their criteria in our website. We say: "Make the site fixed
to 800x600 and 11pt font". Now of course we have left out thousands of other
people that are not happy with the way the site looks, as they were not
planned as part of the target audience. "But the web is for everybody!",
some of you will cry now. "It may be accessible to all of the world, but it
is not usable (or at least it looks shit and it's not fun to interact with).
Shouldn't everybody in the world have the right to receive the same
user-experience?"
The answer is simple: no.
Imagine I would go and complain to TV advertising agencies about their
tampon-advertisements: "I don't feel that you are talking to me in this
advertisement. In fact: watching it bores me!". There is no user-experience
for me in watching TV ads or reading print ads that are not targetted at me.
There is a good reason for that: creating a target audience allows to
address exactly the people you need. And this makes money. MONEY, MONEY,
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. Everybody else that doesn't bring us money: we are not
interested in whether you enjoy yourselves or not.
Okay, even after writing all this I am sure some of you will say this is bad
web development: everybody should have a good user-experience when visiting
a website. I tell those of you: you are bad marketers and your clients don't
get their money's worth. If you believe it or not: commercial clients are
not there to entertain the world. They are not there to ensure that
everybody likes their website. What they want is for the website to create
money.
Here goes. NOW we've got a discussion going.