c.thornquist said:
Most of us read a newspaper daily. And books. And look up numbers in
phone books occasionally. We're accustomed to a much smaller font & more
narrow blocks of text. (W3.org's font size looks typical of a childrens
book.) Why should websites be so different?
Each medium has its own limitations.
One limitation of print media is that once something has been printed, it
is impossible to resize the font to make it easier to read. This is a
*weakness* of the medium, but unfortunately it's one that we have to
accept as it's caused by the physical properties of the materials involved.
The Web does not suffer from this weakness, so why try to impose the
weakness artificially?
Newspaper publishers don't provide several versions of the daily paper
to all customers routinely. It would cost too much.
For a while, The Independent and The Times published their papers in both
broadsheet and tabloid formats, but they've stopped doing that more
recently.
Many books are published in large print editions, translations, braille
editions, "talking books", hardback, softback...
Likewise, I'm not paid enough to build multiple versions of the same
website for different resolutions & monitor sizes.
But here's a point -- it is **easier** to build a site that scales to
different browser canvas areas and font sizes than it is to build a fixed
size website.
This is because HTML is naturally flexible -- it is flexible by default.
You have to make an explicit effort to remove this flexibility (e.g.
explicitly defining widths and/or absolute font sizes).
