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Re:

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From: Gunlaug Sørtun
Date: May 29, 2008 6:00AM


Gareth Dart wrote:
> That said, I've seen this sort of thing around less and less
> recently. I'm sure that a major reason for this is the increasing
> user-awareness of built-in text resizing capabilities, but if there's
> some other reason why they seem to be on the wane, I'd love to know.

I think it is web designers' awareness that has grown most recently.
More and more web designers now understand that in-page font-resizing
and other replication of browsers' built-in functionality that
stylesheet switchers are used for, is mostly the same as "adding butter
on fat". Browsers do it better in most cases, and they (at least try to)
apply the same modifications on all sites.

From my own observations: web designers' awareness of browsers'
capabilities (and quirks) isn't quite as good as I'd like - yet.
Designers should know how the browsers they design for work, and test
that their own creations work reasonably well under stress - at least in
all the major ones.

Example: still plenty of sites blown out of proportion - or completely
to pieces - by browsers' "minimum font size" or "ignore font size in
pages" options...
<http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_1_03_04.html>;
...and most of this "breakage" can be caught and avoided through simple
testing across browser-land.

regards
Georg
--
http://www.gunlaug.no