{"id":120,"date":"2003-11-12T15:07:01","date_gmt":"2003-11-12T20:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=120"},"modified":"2003-11-12T15:07:01","modified_gmt":"2003-11-12T20:07:01","slug":"css-designer-cluelessness-in-a-nutshell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=120","title":{"rendered":"CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The CSS designer for <a href='http:\/\/www.wordpress.org\/'>WordPress<\/a>, the successor to the<br \/>\nb2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous<br \/>\nrant.  In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said &#8220;But<br \/>\neven if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let<br \/>\nyou easily resize this?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This, I&#8217;m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every<br \/>\ntime to get the font sizes I want.  In general, answers of the form<br \/>\n&#8220;you can override the designer&#8217;s preferences by jumping through hoops&#8221;<br \/>\nshow the wrong attitude.  This attitude clashes with the objective<br \/>\nreality of lots of different display devices out there.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also bad human-factors engineering.  As the user, <em>my preferences<br \/>\nshould be primary<\/em> &mdash; in font sizes as in all other things.  That&#8217;s<br \/>\nhow the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don&#8217;t<br \/>\nget this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their<br \/>\nown egos.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately they&#8217;re shooting themselves in the foot, too &mdash; think about<br \/>\nwhat will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and<br \/>\nthe size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at<br \/>\nthe same time desktop displays go to 1600&#215;1200 and higher).<br \/>\nFixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger<br \/>\nlose as time goes on.<\/p>\n<p>To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather<br \/>\nthan an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that&#8217;s when your<br \/>\ndesigns will have real and lasting value.  This is a hard lesson for<br \/>\nartists to learn, but it&#8217;s the only way to avoid filling the web with<br \/>\ndesigns that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display<br \/>\ntechnology improves and becomes more various.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The CSS designer for WordPress, the successor to the b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said &#8220;But even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let you easily resize this?&#8221;. This, I&#8217;m afraid, is CSS&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=120\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}