Webmaster Forum / General / Web Design / July 2009

Yes, there are limits.  However, a good web developer can code web pages
which look good in reasonable sizes.  I'm not talking about when the
user increases the font size to 72 point, for instance - but a few
points larger or smaller should still look good.

Aye, but you can keep the amount of text small, no more than x
characters, especially if it's a caption.

Or perhaps that person is a Copernicus, Galileo, etc -- some people
actually are right while the rest of the world is wrong; even if it
turns out they aren't "self centered egotist; painfully uneducated or
hopelessly clueless" they can certainly be hopelessly frustrating to
attempt to deal with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging and taking sides here, I haven't
been following closely enough to even guess about anything except that
Alfred is in the minority and people are getting frustrated.  And
people with widely varying goals do tend to argue a lot (witness the
Crusades).

I have observed that there seem to be a lot of CSS-based sites that
are nearly unusable because of text overlapping images etc, but
presumably that kind of thing is an implementation trap awaiting the
unwary CSS-newb.  I do feel that html is lacking a few basics that
would make it much more useful, like a pre-defined variable containing
the window width and the ability to use that variable in calculations.
It's basically a fairly minimalized language or people wouldn't still
be using the SSI (server-side include) hack... or maybe they aren't
using it anymore for all I know, I haven't used it for years.

Attempting to build anything (especially something allowing as many
choices as a website) for a customer, and keeping the customer happy
enough to pay the bill without complaining, while doing it with warped
lumber and bent nails, that's a frustrating business.  Maintaining
your integrity as a craftsman while keeping the rent paid is not an
easy thing.  Professionals tend to think of ourselves as somehow
better, more credentialed, wiser than non-professionals -- but at the
same time some of us dream of being able to do things "right" instead
of just well enough to keep the money flowing in the desired
direction.

The winning side doesn't always have to turn out to have been one of
the sides an argument started with, sometimes people can learn and
group together and improve things, sometimes people can recognize that
they're too different to agree so they agree not to, etc.

In fact the entire site is based on font size 13 or higher, to make it
easy for people to read it. That is a large font, larger than the font
on many sites. Font 10 is only used for small auxiliary texts, for which
there is not much screen space available and which are not so important.

Lots of other sites use a similar mix of font sizes. Here is one
example:

http://www.spiegel.de/

This is a major site: PR8, Alexa rank 147.

Again they use a large font for the main text and small fonts for
auxiliary texts which can be skipped because not so important.

Or would you claim that the designers of spiegel.de are "self centered
egotists; painfully uneducated; or hopelessly clueless" ?

Thanks Ed.  I just looked briefly.  

I'm not a fan of dark backgrounds, and I am in favor of a common
menu-bar, but it isn't terminally ugly and I see no problems with the
layout.

It doesn't demand that I download the latest version of anything.
Seems at first glance like a nice solid site.  I'm not sure what all
the fuss is about.