How are these two websites locking their font size (meaning you can’t change it with the “Text Size” command in IE):
I’ve read that these commands may not work on all browsers, so what happens to the page design when the text is enlarged? Also, how effective are these locking commands; do they work on most browsers?
Note: I’m not interesting in the ethics of using this technique; I’m not a fan of it myself. I’m just curious to know how they’re doing what they’re doing.
Whatever they’re doing, it’s a shitty technique - it doesn’t work in Firefox, and they don’t have their tables set up to accomodate different sizes, so text overflows or gets overwritten all over the show. Shoddy work. And a technique that goes against the whole principle of HTML, in that it provides content without dictating exact appearance.
Both websites? I can see IGN doing that, but I’d be surprised at Buy.com as I’d think they’d want to appeal to as many people as possibile.
IIRC, defining the font type and size using CSS will ‘lock’ the font size, atleast for IE.
Ah, thanks.
Well, GorillaMan, I just downloaded Firefox and I can definitely see what you were talking about with IGN. There’s text going everywhere. Buy.com though, seemed to at least conform to the text size.
But that’s just a flaw in IE.
Other browsers that properly follow HTML standards will still adjust the font size at the users command.
In IE you can enable changing the font size by going to tools/internet options/accessibility and check “ignore font sizes”.
Funny. I’m running Mozilla 1.7.3 and having none of the problems in the thread. No locked font size, no badly-coded tables.
Not quite sure what you mean by your last sentence.
Are you suggesting the site should be trying to dictate exact appearance, or that it shouldn’t be?
It shouldn’t. The user should be able to vary the size of text - an obvious example is people with poor eyesight. But there’s other issues, such as substitution of fonts when the specified ones are not available - I’d like to know what the quoted sites look like with Arial et al not installed.
(BTW, my criticisms earlier were for IGN, apologies for being less-than-specific!)
Do you know how hard it is to design a site that accommodates for every single user in every single environment in every single browser?
It’s frickin’ impossible. The best you can hope for is getting the majority of likely users. In this case, the majority is, and will be for a long time, IE users. If it works for them, you can often ignore the rest as being unimportant.
Admittedly, that is bad practice, but far from unusual, and also not surprising.
CSS is not all it’s cracked up to be. There is more work and coding required in getting it compatible cross browser than straight HTML ever had.
If it’s really difficult to make all your text and alignments ‘n’ stuff work with different text sizes, then maybe there’s too much on the page. I’d certainly level that criticism at the two cited by the OP. At a rough guess, there’s 150 hyperlinks on the buy.com page. How can that possibly be anything other than clutter or bad planning? Amazon has about 50 (which are plain blue links, not a variety of fonts and styles), and eBay maybe 40 (ditto). Those sites have far too much on one page, and can only force it in there by insisting text stays at 8-9 pts.
On the other hand, the IGN site displays its thoughtlessness from the start, by not using the right-hand quarter of my screen. That’s like a decorator only painting the bottom two metres of walls, because not many people are taller than that. Idiocy and laziness.
Bull. (Or Guano, if you prefer.
Use straight, standard HTML, and run it thru one of the freely available verifiers to check that it is valid HTML code.
Then it will accomodate around 99% of the users & browsers. (Nobody except you gave this pretty-much-impossible “every single user in every single environment in every single browser”.)
From the OP, how is ‘locking their text size’ a design enhancement that accomodates the majority of users? People have already posted that it doesn’t work in many browsers, and that even in IE it doesn’t work with certain options set.
I was talking about using CSS, the recommended method for site design. Plus, these days you should be using transitional XHTML. All of these things, meant to make site design easier, just triples the workload and frustration, becasue of browser inconsistency.
Though some simple site designs can work with variable font sizes, the more complex the site gets (and it inevitably will for most modern sites) the more you’ll see the need to use fixed widths (fonts, tables, divs, etc) instead of proportional in order to get it looking readable in all relevant browsers.
Well, that’s how it’s been in my experience, anyway.
I got an email from someone today who uses WebTV. I imagine he’s upset our site is impossible to use there, simply because we are using proportional font sizes now. We don’t support WebTV, of course, because of reasons like that. An unfortunate forced side effect to modern web developments.
This only applies to font sized in pixels, and possibly points. Font sizes specified in relative units like ems or percent can be scaled with IE’s font size command. This has been the recommended practice among designers for several years, and I’m surprised that such big sites are still ignoring it.
Both sites look normal and orderly in Shiira (a Safari variant) and both sites let me magnify the font as much as I want to using Command +.
I can shrink it too. I’ve got a minimum size specified in my prefs but I can drop a couple sizes before I get to it.
Nonsense.
First of all, CSS has nothing to do with “HTML standards.” Secondly, section 15.7 of the CSS 2.1 standard makes no such claim with regard to the rendering of absolute font sizes.
No.
Build sites according to web standards and let your web visitors browse happy.
For some of us, it’s the law.
Never underestimate the stupidity of corporate management when it comes to web sites. I’ve had actual conversations along the lines of:
“If we build the site this way, it’ll work with all the browsers out there, and we’ll get more customers.”
“No, it’s okay if it looks good with Internet Explorer 5 on Windows, that will let us use those Microsoft-only features to make our site snazzier.”
“But you’re going to piss off everyone who doesn’t use IE5 on Windows!”
“So what?”
:smack:
Web standards are not consistent between browsers. Not just which ones adopt features, but how they display them. Kludgey workarounds have to be developed to overcome them. These are basic things like widths of boxes or how to display borders. Actually, some CSS2 features don’t work in any browser yet.